A friend recently asked me why we don’t call God Jehovah because He Himself said it was His name, I didn’t know how to answer him. I read in my friend’s type Bible about that but of course I trust my Catholic Bible but I still couldn’t find the answer. Thank you
Yes, Jehovah’s Witnesses use the word “Jehovah” as a device to get Christians to become JW’s.* But it is a ruse.*
Why?Well, in the Watchtower’s own publication about the Divine Name, they themselves state that the pronunciation of the Divine Name has been lost.* In that case, I would like to ask a JW, if God’s name is so important, why did He permit the pronunciation of it to be forgotten?* How can we possibly use His name if we don’t know how to say it?
They may say something like, well, Jehovah is the English translation.*
What, the English translation?* No way.* As everybody knows, the word Jehovah was falsely generated by a Catholic monk in the middle ages.* How then, can a word made up by a Catholic monk in the middle ages possibly be God’s name?* English translation or otherwise?
It’s like if I told you my name, and then later you came to me and said, well, I forgot what you told me your name was, but I made up something else, and I’ll call you by that. Would you appreciate that?* No.* God wouldn’t either, when He especially said what His name was.*
Lets look at the idea of a name further:* It seems to me that a name has three attributes–
- Its pronunciation.* Its spelling.* Its meaning.
The pronunciation of God’s name is now uncertain.* So scratch pronunciation.* We do know the spelling of God’s name–in Hebrew characters! Called the Tetragrammaton. Perhaps we could attempt to transliterate the Tetragrammaton into contemporary Roman letters, but how can we do that if we cannot use the pronunciation as a guide for transliteration?* So scratch that.*
That leaves the meaning.* The meaning therefore must be the important aspect.** And we do know the meaning.* The English translation of the meaning is something like I AM, or I am that I am.* Not “Jehovah.”
So, you needn’t fall into the false trap the Watchtower follower attempts to catch you in.* “Jehovah” is not the English translation of God’s name.* Jehovah isn’t a translation at all, it is actually a failed transliteration.* A transliteration is a spelling of a word from one language in the letters of another language.* A translation expresses the meaning of a word in one language in the word of another language.*
The closest transliterationwe have of God’s name would be something like Yahweh.* The English translation would be as stated above and in other posts on this thread.
As was explained in the other posts, the pronouncing of the Divine name fell out of practice centuries before Christ. In keeping with this, the Pope has recently stated that Catholics should respect this same ancient Jewish tradition.
Incidentally, the Divine name never appears in the inspired New Testament, or Christian Greek scriptures, as the JW’s call it.
Please pray for my friend he has said some hateful things.
