Have you ever heard someone refer to God as “Yahweh”? That’s just the English for His revealed name in the OT, right? That must mean it’s the ancient Christian practice!
N.b. this thread is not about “the secret name of God,” or YHWH, or Jehovah, or vowel pointing, or any other such debate. It is solely focused how & when the six letters “Yahweh” came into common use in English.
A friend asked this week whether a CPH commentary that insists on translating Lord as “Yahweh” is subversive.
My first instinct was “yes, absolutely.” But what do I know? So I turned next to Google Ngrams, which searches over 8M books going back centuries. Ngrams showed just what I imagined: the term was invented in the last two centuries, and took off in popularity very recently. Neither of these are what you want to see when you’re considering sound doctrine. An unchanging God does not engender fickle beliefs.
Ngrams also lets you drill down to any date range to see precisely which hits are represented on the graph. After some spelunking, metadata errors, lots more googling, and hours of reading original source material, here is how we were tricked into saying “Yahweh”.
For thousands of years, there has been debate over the pronunciation of “YHWH”–the name “I am” which God gave Himself from the burning bush in Exodus 3.
Written Hebrew of course has no vowels, so with only the text, there are numerous possibilities for any consonant set.
The Greek Septuagint (LXX) is the Old Testament that was commonly used in Jesus’ day. Hebrew was already a dead language in the 1st century, meaning it was no longer spoken conversationally and most couldn’t read it. Jesus quotes the LXX, as does the NT hundreds of times. So it is relevant how the LXX treats the YHWH “I am”. What we find is that the word is simply and naturally translated “ego eimi”–“I am”. The 4th century Latin Vulgate also faithfully translates it simply as “ego sum”. Zero interest in it as a proper name, vs. a declaration.
This fact is crucial to the question because it ties directly to Christ’s Divinity. When Jesus said, “Before Abraham was I am” He said ego eimi, and the jews tried to murder Him on the spot for blasphemy. He didn’t use some special Hebrew utterance, but “I am”–God’s Name.
For over 14 centuries, every Christian believed that God’s revealed name to Moses was “I am”. In the middle ages, “Jehovah” was invented as a speculative translation of YHWH, a stark departure from treating it like the real word that it is, rather than a magic incantation.
In 1833, a German linguist & theologian named Wilhelm Gesenius joined this more modern trend of speculating on those sounds. In a later edition of his Hebrew & Latin Manual Lexicon, he (admittedly) theorized that “Yahweh” was perhaps the original pronunciation. Gesenius invented his “Yahweh” theory as one possible pronunciation based on his hypothesis that Hebrew had been influenced by the same ancient root that produced Jove & Jupiter. It appears that he retracted within a few years. It is vital to notice that this particular speculation is only possible if one denies the Inspiration of Scripture. The “Documentary Hypothesis” (DH) had taken root by the early 1800s, and informs everything that happens in the rest of this post. Look it up.
https://purebibleforum.com/index.php?threads/gesenius-theorizes-that-yahweh-came-directly-from-egypt-tregelles-rips-to-shreds-g-thoroughly-retracts-something.566/
(The rest will be a 2nd post, as it sources a particular book extensively and images are required.)
