God’s Name Sparks a Controversy

BY AWAKE! WRITER IN THE NETHERLANDS

THE translators of a new Dutch Bible have sparked a controversy among Bible scholars and laypersons alike. The cause? Their decision to render God’s name with the word Heer, or Lord.

In December 1998, just weeks after the translators had released a sample of their work, a group of women belonging to Kerk en Wereld (Church and World), a Protestant organization, launched a protest campaign by mail. The reason? They viewed the word “Lord” as “too masculine.” Soon, other groups—Catholic and Protestant—joined the protest campaign. In February 1999, three scholars added their voices by saying that they advocated simply transliterating the four Hebrew letters of God’s name as YHWH. Before long, Bible scholars, translators, and theologians were meeting in Amsterdam to discuss the issue. At the end of the discussion, all participants were invited to vote on which rendering they preferred.

Under the heading “For God’s Sake, No Fighting About God’s Name,” the newspaper Nieuwsblad van het Noorden reported on the outcome: “The LORD gets merely seven votes. But most of the alternatives do not score much better: the Name (1), the One (3), the Merciful (6), the Unnameable (7), the Living One (10), and the Eternal One (15). And the winner is . . . YHWH!” On March 15, 2001, the Supervision Committee of the new Bible translation decided to use HEER (LORD) in small capital letters to represent the divine name.

This controversy highlights that despite the disagreements about the preferred rendering of God’s name in Dutch, scholars agree that God has a personal name. In Hebrew the name consists of four Hebrew letters, namely, יהוה, or YHWH. How have other Bible translations in Dutch, past and present, rendered YHWH?

A Dutch man named Nicolaas Goetzee published a folio edition of the Staten translation of the Bible in 1762. It stated on the title page: “For weighty and well-known reasons, we have also left God’s Memorial Name JEHOVAH untranslated.” Other well-known Dutch scholars—such as Professor Nicolaas Beets and Petrus Augustus de Genestet—have also used the name Jehovah.

Interestingly, the New World Translation of the Holy Scripturesa consistently uses the name Jehovah. The appendix to the New World Translation in Dutch states that it “continues to use the form ‘Jehovah’ because of people’s familiarity with it for centuries. Moreover, it preserves . . . the four letters of the divine name, YHWH.” The New World Translation has thus helped millions to know the truth regarding God’s name.

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