In the original Hebrew at Isaiah 42:8 you will find, instead of a word for the title “Lord,” these four Hebrew letters that are God’s name יהוה (modern style Hebrew). They are often called the Tetragrammaton (meaning, “four letters”) and are represented in English by YHWH or JHVH. The most common English pronunciations for the Tetragrammaton are “Jehovah” and “Yahweh.” (More will be said about this later.)

God’s ancient Hebrew people had great regard for His name and they made use of it. It was highlighted in the Bible, occurring over 6,900 times. Can you see what that means? God’s name was constantly before true worshipers as they read the “word” of God or heard it read. (Josh. 1:8; 8:34, 35) For instance, Moses commanded the people to gather regularly to listen to the reading of the law in Deuteronomy, which meant hearing God’s name over 500 times. (Deut. 31:10-12) Also, it seems that Psalms 113 to 118 were sung by each family at every Passover. In the 29 verses of Psalm 118 alone, the personal name of God would be sung 22 times.​—Compare Matthew 26:30.

WHY DID THEY STOP USING HIS NAME?

The Hebrew worshipers had abundant reasons to make use of God’s name. The Bible exhorted them to “call upon his name,” and to ‘love his name.’ (Isa. 12:4; Ps. 69:36) Despite that, at some rather late point, the Jews began superstitiously to avoid pronouncing that sacred name. In reading the Bible, as they came to it, they said Adonay (LORD) or Elohim (God). But why?

Some say that this resulted from a fear of misusing the sacred name of God. It is true that the Ten Commandments said that his name was not to be taken up in a worthless way. (Ex. 20:7) That clearly ruled out any flippant or fraudulent use of the name. And Leviticus 24:16 commanded that any abuser of God’s name, whether a native Hebrew or an alien resident, was to be put to death. But that meant to avoid abusing it, not to avoid using it. Thus, the evidence indicates that during much of the Biblical period ordinary Hebrews did use God’s name, both in religious activities and respectfully in daily aspects of life.

For example, in 1961, an ancient burial cave was uncovered some 20 miles (32 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem. The cave appears to date from the time of King Hezekiah (745-716 B.C.E.). On its walls were Hebrew inscriptions using the Tetragrammaton, such as “Jehovah is the God of the whole earth.” And, in 1966, there was published a report on pottery fragments with writing on them that were found at Arad, in southern Israel. One of them, which you see, was a private letter in the Hebrew language from a subordinate to Eliashib. The letter began: “To my lord Eliashib, Yahweh may ask for thy peace. And now . . .”​—Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 74-92; Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-7.

In view of the fact that many ancient Hebrews even used the divine name in settings that were not exclusively religious, one might wonder when the superstitious avoidance of it developed. Actually, no one today can say for sure. Some have held, on the basis of Jewish rabbinical writings, that the name was not used in the first century when Jesus was on earth. But if the superstitious avoidance of it was spreading then, it does not mean that God’s personal name was never used. In this regard, Dr. M. Reisel wrote: “The Tetragrammaton must have been pronounced by the High Priest until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.”

You may wonder, though, about Jesus and his apostles. Would they have used God’s name in writing, speech or in reading the Scriptures? For example, what about the time when Jesus stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth and read Isaiah 61:1? The Tetragrammaton appears in the Hebrew text, which begins: “The spirit of the Lord Yahweh has been given to me, . . .” (Jerusalem Bible) Do you think that, even if some superstitious Jews declined to pronounce the divine name, Jesus would intentionally avoid it? Remember that he said: “I have made your name manifest to the men you gave me out of the world.”​—John 17:6.

So, somewhere around 280 B.C.E., the Hebrew Scriptures began to be translated into Greek, producing what is known as the Greek Septuagint Version (LXX).

When Jesus began his ministry, this version was widely used by Greek-speaking Jews. We can tell from the wording of the apostles’ writings that they were familiar with the Septuagint, and Jesus surely was also.

But did that Greek translation contain God’s name? The most complete manuscripts of the Septuagint that have survived, which date from the fourth century C.E., reveal a startling situation. Wherever the Hebrew Bible had the Tetragrammaton, the Greek Septuagint substituted the words “God” (Theos) and “Lord” (Kyrios). Hence, the view of the scholarly world has been that Jesus and his apostles did not use God’s personal name. It has been claimed that, when they read or quoted from the Scriptures in Hebrew, they followed the custom of pronouncing instead the words for “Lord” or “God.” And as for the Septuagint copy that they used, it did not even contain the Name.

Most theologians have held confidently to this view. But now what about the clue from the Cave of Horrors?

THE JUDEAN CLUE

Recall that the Cave of Horrors, in the Judean desert, had contained some leather fragments of the Twelve Prophets from a scroll written somewhere around the time that Jesus was born. It was in Greek, being in the form of the Septuagint. But what about God’s name? Note the reproduction here shown.

These fragments from the Judean desert contained the divine name in a old style of Hebrew! Even though the main text was in Greek, God’s name in Hebrew letters was retained. The Greek title Kyrios was not substituted for the Tetragrammaton, as was done in Septuagint manuscripts in later centuries.

Then, even more recently, another important clue has received attention. It, too, has a significant bearing on whether God’s name should be in your Bible, and, hence, whether you should be using that name. This clue came to light in Cairo.

THE EGYPTIAN CLUE

The clue consists of many fragments of an ancient papyrus scroll of Deuteronomy, with the museum listing Fouad Papyri Number 266. Though these fragments had been located in the 1940’s, they were inaccessible to the scholarly community for study.

In 1950 the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures first published photographs of a number of these rare fragments. Still, throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s most experts did not have access to the actual fragments, and no other scholarly publication had reproduced photographs or made an analysis of them all. Finally, the 1971 volume of Études de Papyrologie did so. But what was so unusual about the fragments? And how do they bear on the use of God’s name?

The Fouad 266 papyri were prepared in the second or the first century B.C.E. They are not in Hebrew but in Greek. Take a look at the writing in the samples of Fouad 266 reproduced below. Do you see that, even though the main text is in Greek, the Tetragrammaton in square Hebrew letters is used? So the copyist of this papyrus scroll also did not substitute the Greek words for “Lord” (Kyrios) or “God.” Rather, over 30 times he put​—in the midst of the Greek writing—​the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew letters!

Dr. Paul E. Kahle of Oxford explained that these fragments contain “perhaps the most perfect Septuagint text of Deuteronomy that has come down to us.” In Studia Patristica, he added, “We have here in a papyrus scroll a Greek text which represents the text of the Septuagint in a more reliable form than Codex Vaticanus and was written more than 400 years before.” And it retained God’s personal name, as did the Greek fragments of the Twelve Prophets from the Judean desert. Both agreed.

In the Journal of Biblical Literature (Vol. 79, pp. 111-118), Dr. Kahle surveyed the accumulating evidence regarding the use of the divine name among the Jews and concluded:

“All Greek translations of the Bible made by Jews for Jews in pre-Christian times must have used, as the name of God, the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew characters and not [Kyrios], or abbreviations of it, such as we find in the Christian” copies of the Septuagint.

This singling out of the divine name for careful preservation was manifest even in Hebrew-language texts from around the first century. In some of the Hebrew scrolls from the caves near the Dead Sea, the Tetragrammaton was written in red ink or an easily distinguished older type of Hebrew. J. P. Siegel commented on this:

“When the Qumran manuscripts were first discovered more than twenty years ago, one of their more startling features was the appearance, in a limited group of texts, of the Tetragrammaton written in palaeo-Hebrew characters. . . . That this practice signifies a deep reverence for the Divine Name(s) is almost a truism.”​—Hebrew Union College Annual, 1971.

Additionally, it has been reported that in first-century Jerusalem there was a Hebrew scroll of the five books of Moses with the Tetragrammaton in gold letters.​—Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 22, 1972, pp. 39-43.

Does not this new evidence strongly indicate to you that Jesus would have been very familiar with and would have used the divine name, whether he read the Scriptures in Greek or in Hebrew?

Something New About God’s Name?

IN THE last pages we have considered some surprising new evidence about the use of God’s name in the period when Jesus and the apostles were on earth.

Do you see the conclusion to which this evidence points? What is its bearing on what you should find in the Bible and on how you personally view God’s name? Consider the conclusions of a noted authority who studied the manuscript evidence:

Little more than a year ago, George Howard, associate professor of religion at the University of Georgia, came to grips with the issues involved in the Journal of Biblical Literature. (Vol. 96, No. 1, 1977, pp. 63-83) His article begins:

“Recent discoveries in Egypt and the Judean Desert allow us to see first hand the use of God’s name in pre-Christian times.”

He then discussed the recently published Greek texts from the pre-Christian period that you have seen reproduced on preceding pages. Regarding the previously accepted view that in the Septuagint the Greek title Kyrios was always substituted for God’s name, we read:

“From these findings we can now say with almost absolute certainty that the divine name, יהוה, was not rendered by [Kyrios] in the pre-Christian Greek Bible, as so often has been thought.”

What about the general mass of Dead Sea Scrolls? Professor Howard writes:

“Perhaps the most significant observation we can draw from this pattern of variegated usage of the divine name is that the Tetragram was held to be very sacred. . . . In copying the biblical text itself the Tetragram was carefully guarded. This protection of the Tetragram was extended even to the Greek translation of the biblical text.”

BUT WHAT OF JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES?

While all of the foregoing may be of special interest to scholars, what bearing does it have on your Bible? What view should you have concerning the use of God’s personal name?

Professor Howard draws some important conclusions. First, he points out:

“We know for a fact that Greek-speaking Jews continued to write יהוה within their Greek Scriptures. Moreover, it is most unlikely that early conservative Greek-speaking Jewish Christians varied from this practice. . . . It would have been extremely unusual for them to have dismissed the Tetragram from the biblical text itself.”

What did the writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures do when quoting from the books of the Hebrew Bible, whether from the original Hebrew or from a Greek translation? Did they use the Tetragrammaton when it appeared in the source from which they were quoting? Based on the evidence that is now available, Professor Howard explains:

“Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text. On the analogy of pre-Christian Jewish practice we can imagine that the NT text incorporated the Tetragram into its OT quotations.”

Why, then, do all extant copies of the “New Testament” lack the Tetragrammaton? Might God’s name have been removed after the apostles died? That is what the evidence shows. Professor Howard goes on:

“The Tetragram in these quotations would, of course, have remained as long as it continued to be used in the Christian copies of the LXX. But when it was removed from the Greek OT, it was also removed from the quotations of the OT in the NT.”

“Thus somewhere around the beginning of the second century the use of surrogates [substitutes for God’s name] must have crowded out the Tetragram in both Testaments. Before long the divine name was lost to the Gentile church altogether except insofar as it was reflected in the contracted surrogates or occasionally remembered by scholars.” (Italics added)

THIS IS NEW! OR IS IT?

Many scholars reading the Journal of Biblical Literature may have been surprised at the conclusion reached, namely, that the divine name, Jehovah (Yahweh) appeared in the “New Testament” when it was originally written. It may have seemed new, for it is an about-face from the long-held view that Christian writers avoided using the divine name. But is it new?

Away back in 1796 Dominikus von Brentano used the divine name at places in his German translation of the “New Testament.” Consider, for example, Mark 12:29, which you see here reproduced. Jesus had been asked, “Which is the foremost commandment?” Brentano’s translation then reads: “The foremost commandment, answered Jesus, is this: Hear Israel! Jehovah, our God, is the only God.”

29. Das allervornehmste Gebot, antwortete Jesus, ist dieß: Höre Israel! Jehovah, unser Gott, ist der einige Gott^◊).

Did Brentano have good reason for showing Jesus as pronouncing the divine name? Yes, for Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 6:4, which contains the Tetragrammaton. Certainly Jesus was not tradition-bound, as most Jewish religious leaders were, for Jesus ‘taught as a person having authority and not as the scribes.’ (Matt. 7:29) Christ publicly said that he desired to glorify his Father’s name, both his actual name and all the purposes and accomplishments associated with that name. (John 12:28) And near the end of his earthly life he said that he had made his Father’s name known. So translator Brentano had a logical basis for presenting Jesus as using God’s name when quoting a text containing it.​—John 17:6, 26.

Similarly, Matthew’s Gospel account alone contains more than 100 quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. In 1950 the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures said about Matthew: “Where these quotations included the divine name, he would be obliged faithfully to include the tetragrammaton.”

This translation in 1950 reached the same basic conclusion set forth later on in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1977. In view of the evidence that the writers of the “New Testament” encountered the Tetragrammaton, whether they quoted scriptures from the Hebrew text or from the Greek Septuagint, the Foreword of the New World Translation stated:

“The modern translator is warranted in using the divine name as an equivalent of [the Greek words for “Lord” and “God”] at places where Matthew, etc., quote verses, passages and expressions from the Hebrew Scriptures or from the LXX where the divine name occurs.”

Thus, the position set out by Professor Howard in 1977 is not entirely a new one. But it brings to light fine new evidence that was not available when the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures in 1950 used “Jehovah” 237 times in the “New Testament.”

Certainly, then, God’s name does have a place in translations of the Bible. It belongs there, to be used and appreciated by all true worshipers who desire to do what Jesus did​—glorify his Father’s name—​and who pray, “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.”​—Matt. 6:9, Authorized Version.

[Picture on page 9]

Nahal Hever, looking eastward over the Dead Sea