Jehovah is not the Name of God
I have lived in Bayonne, New Jersey almost my entire life (1950-1965, 1968-1983, 1991-present) and have noticed when I travel (I've passed through more than half the country) that many words I have grown up with are unfamiliar in other states.
Actually, some words are unfamiliar in other parts of New Jersey. Bayonne is in Hudson County and many of the local words and idioms come from the time of the Dutch settlements. For instance, in Bayonne and other areas surrounding New York City we use the term "sliding pond" [perhaps from the Dutch "bann" (track)] for a playground slide. My wife who previously resided in central Jersey uses the term "sliding board".
In the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago areas you can ask the waiter what kind of soda they carry but in the South it's "coke" while most of the northern states the usual term is "pop" or "soda pop". For a detailed map of soda/pop usage in the US click here.
Without going into details, it gets even more complicated when traveling through other English speaking countries where we can hear the terms soft drinks, fizzy drinks, colas, cold drinks, minerals, fizzy bubblies, cooldrinks, colddrinks, ciders, cokes, soda drinks, and pops.
So although there are hundreds of millions of speakers of English, we sometimes might as well be speaking another language.
While researching the origins of many words I often find that many words are now in our language under false pretenses. Here follow some examples:
- The "chalk" used in schools is not made of chalk (calcium carbonate) but gypsum (Calcium sulfate).
- Inchworms are neither an inch long, nor worms.
- Now this one always bothered me as a child: Grape-Nuts contains neither grapes nor nuts.
- Speaking of nuts, peanuts and coconuts are not nuts.
- The "lead" in pencils is not made of lead but graphite and clay.
- "Tin foil" is made from aluminum and "tin cans" for food storage are made from steel.
- The titmouse is a bird, not a mouse.
- Most golf "woods" are made of metal.
- Guinea pigs are not pigs nor do they come from Guinea.
- An egg cream (chocolate flavored syrup with seltzer and milk) usually contains neither eggs nor cream.
- Head cheese is really a sliced meat product.
- Starfish and jellyfish are not fish.
- Arabic numerals actually originated in India, see my article The Arab Contribution to Civilization: Nothing Lately.
Our language is filled with many such mistakes, but the biggest one is where we have assigned the term "Jehovah" as the name of God. When I was 12 years old my best friend was R.W. a Jehovah Witness. It wasn't until years later when I studied and learned Hebrew that I realized that when Moses asked the name of God [Exodus 3:14], he was told, "Mind your own business!"
Some of you may have been taught that God replied, "I am who I am". But in Hebrew, as in many languages, expressions like "I'm going where I'm going" or "I'm doing what I'm doing" or "I'm leaving when I'm leaving" are replies to questions that the speaker believes are none of the askers' business.
The Tetragrammaton YHVH is sometimes translated as Yahweh although after the Babylonian captivity Jews stopped pronouncing God’s name over a pagan superstition called "ineffability" (1) and instead used the word Adonai (Hebrew word meaning Lord) in its place. So that today no one knows exactly how it was originally pronounced.
But that is not important; if an American Jehovah Witness were to meet the Lord God of Abraham and asked for His name, He would reply in English: "I do not need a name - but you can call me "Yoh".
So they should be called "Yoh's Witnesses".
ENDNOTES
(1):
vindication.xanga, The "Tetragram" or "Tetragrammaton" of Jehovah's Divine Name
"For several reasons Jacob ("Im Namen Gottes," p. 167) assigns the disuse of the word 'Yhwh' and the substitution of 'Adonai' (LORD) to the later decades of the Babylonian exile." -The Jewish Encyclopedia TETRAGRAMMATON; by Crawford Howell Toy, and Ludwig Blau
"...But at least by the third century B.C.E. the pronunciation of the name YHWH (Jehovah) was avoided, and Adonai, "the Lord," was substituted for it..."
- Encyclopedia Judaica (p. 679)."Reason for Disuse: The avoidance of the original name of God both in speech and, to a certain extent, in the Bible - was due, according to Geiger ("Urschrift," p. 262), to a reverence which shrank from the utterance of the Sublime Name; and it may well be that such a reluctance first arose in a foreign, and hence in an "unclean" land, very possibly, therefore, in Babylonia. According to Dalman (l.c. pp. 66 et seq.),"
-The Jewish Encyclopedia TETRAGRAMMATON; by Crawford Howell Toy, and Ludwig Blau"When the Yisraeli (Israelites) came out of Babylonian captivity, they brought along with them the Babylonian culture, and along with it Babylonian beliefs and superstitions. One of these pagan Babylonian practices or beliefs was called "ineffability." This was the superstition against using the name of a deity for fear of something bad happening to them. The idea was that if you said the name of a deity he or she would notice you. The pagan practice of ineffability was further reinforced by Greek Hellenization." -(b.Pes. 50a) (b.Kidd. 71a).
