YHWH

I hope to make this post a bit short, but I mentioned in one of my recent comments that I would explain how the Romans 10:8-13 verses show that Jesus is the same God of the Old Testament. But before doing that, we have to understand a couple things about the word, "Lord".

I hope you find this interesting... it's a VERY useful piece of information when talking with Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other claim-to-be-Christian-but-not-really-Christian groups. And please please please, if there is anything confusing about what I write, please ask! Write it in the comments or email me. If you want to skip the detailed stuff, just go to the last sentence of this entry.

The name of God that Moses received from God was YHWH (that's what most English-speaking scholars will use in place of the Hebrew letters, Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey), for "I AM". Why no vowels? Because the Jews strongly believe that the name of God is so holy that it ought not be spoken, so to do this, they have no vowels. Also, historically, no vowels were written when writing and copying the scriptures. (The vowels generally are a series of dots and lines underneath the consonants. None of the Hebrew "letters" are vowels.)

So, the name God gave to Moses in Hebrew was YHWH. Instead of saying this word in prayer, the Jews would replace it with the word, "Adonai" which means LORD. In conversation, they may use the word Ha'Shem which also means LORD.

How about the New Testament, then? It was written in Greek, not Hebrew. The Greek word for Lord is Kurios/Kurion/Kuriou, depending on how it's used in a sentence. So when people said "Lord" at that time period, we have good reason to believe this: most likely people were saying "Adonai" or "Ha'Shem" and the New Testament writers translated that as "Kurio_"

How did the words "Yahweh" and "Jehovah" come about? Are they the same thing? Yes, they are the same word originating from YHWH. You can see how "Yahweh" came from YHWH.

How did "Jehovah" come about? In Old English, etc., the "J" was pronounced like a "Y" ("yuh") and the "V" was pronounced like a "W" (From what I remember). So that's how they got the consonants JHVH. It is believed the vowels came from "Adonai". So from that we get Jahovaih. With enough centuries passing by, that's how we eventually got "Jehovah".

So now with that big language lesson there, we can see that the words used for God's name can be written as YHWH, Adonai, Ha'Shem, Yahweh, Jehovah, Lord, I AM, and ego eimi (Greek for "I am").

testing the water

I'm first going to see if I get "junk mail" comments this evening because I'm allowing for more comment options for the blog... we'll see how this goes.

test2

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I'm tired.




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