I suspiciously wonder about David Brener and his belief system and how tied he is to a belief that Jesus and Jehovah are the same. So why bother with Jehovah. Right. After all he is Jesus. Really? Check out Deut.18.15,18,19: "A prophet from your own midst, from your brothers, like me, is what Jehovah your God will raise up for you--to whom you people should listen.......A prophet I shall raise up for them from the midst of their brothers, like you; and I shall indeed put my words in his mouth, and he will certainly speak to them all that I shall command him. And it must occur that the man who will not listen to my words that he will speak in my name, I shall myself require an account from him." See also Micah 5.2,4 See also Isa. 26.13
2 “But in the latter days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and peoples shall flow unto it. And many nations shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem; and he will judge between many peoples, and will decide concerning strong nations afar off: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of Jehovah of hosts hath spoken it. For all the peoples walk every one in the name of his god; and we will walk in the name of Jehovah our God for ever and ever.”—Mic. 4:1-5, AS.
Any wonder though the confusion. Substitute LORD. Jesus sounds like it's Jehovah's words when Jesus speaks. Both Lords must be the same lord (PS.110.1) Therefore Jehovah is Jesus.
George Howard in writing in "The Anchor Bible Dictionary, under Tetragrammeton," basically alludes to this very point:
It is possible that some confusion ensued from the abandonment of the Tetragrammaton in the N.T.,
although the significance of this confusion can only be conjectured. In all probability it became
difficult to know whether KS referred to the Lord God or the Lord Jesus Christ. That this issue played a role in the later Trinitarian debates, however, is unknown.
George Howard
Read Psalms 148-150
Praise Jah!*
Praise Jehovah from the heavens;+
Praise him in the heights.
Praise him, all his army.+
3 Praise him, sun and moon.
Praise him, all shining stars.+
7 Praise Jehovah from the earth,
You great sea creatures and all deep waters,
8 You lightning and hail, snow and thick clouds,
You storm wind, carrying out his word,+
You fruit trees and all you cedars,+
You creeping things and winged birds,
11 You kings of the earth and all you nations,
You princes and all you judges of the earth,+
Old men and young together.*
His majesty is above earth and heaven.+
For the praise of all his loyal ones,
Of the sons of Israel, the people close to him.
Praise Jah!*
He adorns the meek with salvation.+
6 Let the songs praising God be in their throat,
And a two-edged sword be in their hand,
7 To execute vengeance on the nations
And punishment on the peoples,
8 To bind their kings with shackles
And their nobles with iron fetters,
This honor belongs to all his loyal ones.
Praise Jah!*
Praise God in his holy place.+
Praise him for his exceeding greatness.+
Praise him with the stringed instrument and the harp.+
5 Praise him with ringing cymbals.
Praise him with crashing cymbals.+
6 Every breathing thing—let it praise Jah.
Praise Jah!*+
When Jesus Christ was on earth, he ‘made his Father’s name manifest’ to his disciples. (Joh 17:6, 26) Although having earlier known that name and being familiar with God’s activities as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, these disciples came to know Jehovah in a far better and grander way through the One who is “in the bosom position with the Father.” (Joh 1:18) Christ Jesus perfectly represented his Father, doing the works of his Father and speaking, not of his own originality, but the words of his Father. (Joh 10:37, 38; 12:50; 14:10, 11, 24) That is why Jesus could say, “He that has seen me has seen the Father also.”—Joh 14:9.
This clearly shows that the only ones truly knowing God’s name are those who are his obedient servants. (Compare 1Jo 4:8; 5:2, 3.) Jehovah’s assurance at Psalm 91:14, therefore, applies to such persons: “I shall protect him because he has come to know my name.” The name itself is no magical charm, but the One designated by that name can provide protection for his devoted people. Thus the name represents God himself. That is why the proverb says: “The name of Jehovah is a strong tower. Into it the righteous runs and is given protection.” (Pr 18:10) This is what persons do who cast their burden on Jehovah. (Ps 55:22) Likewise, to love (Ps 5:11), sing praises to (Ps 7:17), call upon (Ge 12:8), give thanks to (1Ch 16:35), swear by (De 6:13), remember (Ps 119:55), fear (Ps 61:5), search for (Ps 83:16), trust (Ps 33:21), exalt (Ps 34:3), and hope in (Ps 52:9) the name is to do these things with reference to Jehovah himself. To speak abusively of God’s name is to blaspheme God.—Le 24:11, 15, 16.
Jehovah is jealous for his name, tolerating no rivalry or unfaithfulness in matters of worship. (Ex 34:14; Eze 5:13) The Israelites were commanded not even to mention the names of other gods. (Ex 23:13) In view of the fact that the names of false gods appear in the Scriptures, evidently the reference concerns mentioning the names of false gods in a worshipful way.
I briefly wrote David Brener with my concerns:
I respectfully disagree with you. Not on whether we know or have to use the correct pronunciation, but the usage of that name. To use shem, or ha shem, as a substitute is a copout. The divine name in the "Biblical Hebraica Stuttgartensia" occurs 6828 times. A failure to use that name and to say that YHWH just wanted us to display, preach, sing praises to his character is indeed a disservice to that very character you claim to want to espouse. "Make melody to YHWH O you holy ones. Is it to his Character we are to make melody? Possibly. But to whose Character are we thus making melody to? Is it not YHWH's? Ps 30.4. But, in fact, for this cause I have kept you in existence, for the sake of showing you my power and in order to have my name declared in all the earth. Ex.9.16. Is it his Character that is to be delclared ? Yes, but in association with who? Yhwh? Exodus 15 Moses' victory song " My strength and my might is Yah, since he serves for my salvation. This is my God, and I shall laud him, my fathers God, and I shall raise him on high. YHWH is a manly person of war. YHWH is his name. "So in the name of Jesus every knee should bend. Philippians 2.10. Is it his character or His literal name along with his character? "And all the peoples of the earth will have to see that YHWH's name has been called upon you.. Deut. 28.10 Whose name? His Character? Note the text says yhwh's shem
Your case turns on a false dilemma. You oppose “character” to “name,” as if Scripture asked us to choose between the two, and then you treat a single orthographic outcome—the constant vocalization of the Tetragrammaton—as the only way to honor God’s revelation. But in the Bible the “name” of God is the public revelation of who he is; the two are inseparable. When the Lord “proclaims his name” to Moses, he does not teach a syllabary lesson—he declares his merciful and just character (“YHWH, YHWH, a God merciful and gracious…,” Exod 34:6–7). To “declare my name in all the earth” (Exod 9:16) is to make the true God known as the one who judges Pharaoh and saves Israel. That is why Deuteronomy speaks of the Temple as the place where God “causes his name to dwell”: not so that Israelites can rehearse consonants, but so that his presence, authority, and covenant fidelity stand among them. In Hebrew usage shem is a metonym for the person—his identity, reputation, and claimed rights. Praising the Name in the Psalms is praising the God whom the Name designates. Demanding a single visible form in every language mistakes the sign for the thing signified.
ReplyDeleteOnce that is clear, your appeal to frequency collapses. That the Tetragrammaton appears roughly 6,800 times in the Hebrew Scriptures tells us what the consonantal text contains; it does not decide how the name must be handled in every linguistic context. Long before the Church, synagogue lection treated יהוה with voiced surrogates like ’ădōnāy (“Lord”) and sometimes ’ĕlōhîm (“God”). In Greek, the settled equivalent for Israel’s God was kyrios. The New Testament is a Greek collection, written by authors who move inside that environment. It never prints the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. It consistently writes kyrios and theos, very often in the sacred abbreviations that marked those words as holy. When the apostles cite Old Testament passages that contain יהוה, they cite them from Greek forms that already say kyrios. You do not repair fidelity to Scripture by inserting a Hebrew form that the New Testament never uses. You replace the apostolic record with your preferred anachronism.
This is why the lament about “substituting LORD” causing confusion between the Father and the Son misfires. The New Testament’s deliberate use of kyrios is not a careless homonymy; it is the theological engine that lets the writers place Jesus within the divine identity while never collapsing him into the Father. Paul can confess “one God, the Father” and “one Lord, Jesus Christ” in a conscious re-articulation of Israel’s Shema, then turn and apply a YHWH text—“everyone who calls on the name of the Lord”—to Jesus without ambiguity for his readers. The same Greek term can refer to the God of Israel or to the risen Jesus because the apostolic proclamation dares to say that what the Scriptures call Kyrios, Jesus now bears in glory. The problem is not that LORD “sounds like” Jesus when Jesus speaks; the point is that Scripture itself teaches that Jesus shares the prerogatives, worship, and scriptural predicates of Israel’s Lord. That is not confusion; it is the heart of Christian confession.
Your quotation from George Howard only shows how easy it is to turn a historical hypothesis into a dogma and then into a printing program. Howard floated the possibility that abandoning the Tetragrammaton in Greek might have introduced some interpretive difficulty. What that does not give you is evidence that the New Testament ever contained the Hebrew name, nor does it justify retrofitting “Jehovah” into hundreds of verses against every extant Greek witness. From our earliest papyri onward, Christians sanctify kyrios and theos as nomina sacra; we have no New Testament manuscript that writes יהוה. If your principle is “leave what the apostles wrote,” then the honest path in the New Testament is to translate kyrios, not to replace it.
DeleteNor do your proof-texts do the work you assign them. Deuteronomy 18 promises a prophet like Moses in whose mouth God will put his words; nothing in that promise requires that Israel speak the Tetragrammaton rather than obey the prophet’s voice. Micah’s vision of nations streaming to the mountain of YHWH is the very passage the New Testament sees fulfilled as the Gentiles enter Zion’s teaching through the gospel, and the Lord of that Zion is named Kyrios in their Greek Scriptures and prayers. Isaiah 26:13 contrasts false lords with the Lord who alone rules his people; it is a text that illuminates, rather than undermines, why confessing Jesus as Kyrios is so momentous. Psalm 110:1 proves no confusion; in Hebrew the LORD (YHWH) speaks to “my lord” (’adoni), and Jesus uses it to show that the Messiah is David’s superior who sits at YHWH’s right hand. The Septuagint renders both with kyrios because that is the Greek for both YHWH and ’adoni; the distinction lies in syntax and context, not in printing a different glyph. To infer from the shared Greek term that “therefore Jehovah is Jesus” merely restates your premise; it does not exegete the text.
Your appeal to the “Hallelujah” psalms boomerangs. Christians never abandoned the summons to praise the Name; they sing it every Easter in the very transliterated cry you quote—“Alleluia”—and they have for two millennia. But they do so in the languages where God gave them to sing. The Church’s Greek “Kyrie eleison,” its Latin “Laudate nomen Domini,” its English “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” are not acts of infidelity; they are acts of obedience to the pattern of Scripture in translation. The Psalter’s call to “praise the name of YHWH” is fulfilled every time the Name’s referent is exalted in the words Scripture itself uses in that language. Insisting that one must utter a reconstructed vocalization “Yahweh” or a medieval hybrid “Jehovah” in order to satisfy the Psalms is to smuggle a twentieth-century shibboleth into ancient texts.
John 17 does not save your thesis; it subverts it. When Jesus says, “I have made your name known,” nothing in the Gospel suggests he did so by teaching a pronunciation the evangelists then promptly refused to write. He “manifested the Name” by revealing the Father—his mercy, will, and saving purpose—and by granting access to the Father in himself. That is why he immediately prays that the Father’s love may be in them and that he himself may be in them; the revelation of the Name is relational, not phonological. If “knowing the name” in Psalm 91 denotes covenant trust under God’s protection, then the Son’s making the Name known is the climactic act by which the Father is known through the Son and in the Spirit. The New Testament’s relentless kyrios is not a betrayal of that revelation; it is the literary form in which the revelation reached the nations.