Why Christians Don't Use "Jehovah" As Often

Answering a question on Quora:

Why do you rarely hear Christians who are non-Jehovah's Witnesses, referring to God as Jehovah God (or rarely even Just Jehovah) like the Jehovah's Witnesses do?

The Watchtower (the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ organization) teaches that God has a personal name, and it is Jehovah. It teaches that knowing and using God’s name is critical to being able to worship Him.

Many Christians (non-Jehovah’s Witnesses) do use the name Jehovah, but much less for several reasons. If you want a short answer, skip to the end; but if you want to learn the reasons behind the answer, keep reading.

A more complex doctrine of God requires more terms.

The Bible gives evidence that Persons called the Father, the Son (Jesus, Christ, Messiah, the Lord, the Son of Man), and the Holy Spirit are God — and yet, there is but one God. Modalists such as Oneness Pentecostals try to solve this apparent paradox by saying that God switches between personas. However, this creates problems such as when the Son and the Father speak to each other and when scriptures say the Father subjects all things to the Son except Himself. Latter Day Saints (“Mormons”) say Jesus was, like all angels, demons, and humans, a spirit-child of God the Father who will become a god of his own world on Judgment Day. This, like the Modalist god, violates the scriptures’ teaching that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. The Jewish faith denies the evidence that Jesus was divine, and many deny that He even existed. The Watchtower accepts that Jesus existed, but teaches that He was an angel, a small-g god who became Jesus of Nazareth and then became an exalted angel (again, see Hebrews 13:8).

Christians resolve the paradox by supposing that the Creator of the universe – meaning that God created not only matter and energy, but also space-time – can do anything He wishes, so long as it is good and not a logical impossibility. From the scriptures’ claims, they conclude that God used creative power to function in and experience space-time as three Persons. This Tri-unity (one God as three Persons) is a solution, not a problem. It bypasses many problems that Bible-recognizing religions face when they reject the Trinity.

As a result, to Christians, God has a more complex identity. They can speak of God in general as God, the Almighty, the Creator, etc.; or they might speak of a specific person, namely, the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. (Note that God is “Lord,” regardless of which Person you speak of; but for the sake of communication, the scriptures often distinguish the Father from the Son by calling the Father, God, and calling Christ, Lord.)

Jehovah is not God's name.

Another reason Christians do not use the term Jehovah very often is that it is not actually God’s name! God does not need a name. There are no other real gods from whom to distinguish Him. Also, no god preceded and created Him, so nobody had the authority to name Him. On the other hand, God does take many descriptive titles and names, not for His own sake, but for ours.

The name "Jehovah" started when the Israelites were enslaved in a land with many so-called gods. (You will see, a few paragraphs later, why I put "Jehovah" in scare quotes.) When God was commissioning Moses to lead the Israelites, Moses asked whom he should say was sending him. God responded, “say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" This was a functional name chosen by God, not for His own sake, but for Israel’s. He is the I AM, as contrasted with all the other gods, who ARE NOT.

Jehovah is an incorrect pronunciation

The Hebrew word translated I AM is YHWH. Note that ancient Hebrew writing had no vowels. It had only consonants.

During the 400 years before Christ, the Jews had a revival of respect for God. They became so obsessed with rules that they would not dare to pronounce YHWH. Instead, when speaking, such as when reading scriptures aloud, they substituted the name Adonai, which means Lord. Consequently, they forgot how YHWH was pronounced! By the time of Christ, it had become common practice to combine the vowels from Adonai with the consonants YHWH, which produced Yahowah or Yahweh.

Now, transliterate Yahowah to Greek, transliterate that to Latin, and transliterate that to English, and you get Jehovah. So Jehovah is, at best, a twisted pronunciation of a word whose pronunciation was lost over 2,000 years ago.

Jehovah is an obsolete transliteration

In 1611, the Authorized Version (King James Version or KJV) used the word Jehovah in some places (and LORD, in all caps, in most places) to translate YHWH. Many readers of the KJV use the word Jehovah as a name for God. But many others simply use God or Lord, and the spread of modern Bible translations that do not use the word Jehovah reinforces that trend.

Within and outside Christianity there are movements such as Hebrew Roots that make a big deal about pronouncing YHWH and Jesus with original Hebrew pronunciations. This sounds cool and may make a person feel that he has special knowledge or special reverence for God, but biblical Christians do not think there is magical power in words and pronunciations. The power is in the meaning they convey, and God is omni-lingual.

Jehovah is Jesus

There’s yet another reason Christians use the word Jehovah less often. John chapter 1 teaches that Jesus is the Word, meaning that He is the expressive member of the Tri-unity. Jesus Himself said, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” In other words, it was God the Son, before he took on the bodily form we call Jesus, who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. So, in a monumental irony, the term that the Watchtower uses to label God actually refers to the Person whose deity they deny!

Summary

Christians use the word Jehovah less than Jehovah’s Witnesses do because the Jehovah's Witnesses inflate its usage and misuse it. Christians use it even less than they used to because laymen (as contrasted with clergy) are growing in awareness that it is a descriptive label rather than a personal name, it is a bad transliteration of a word whose pronunciation has been forgotten, it is not a general label for God, it is an incorrect label for God the Father, and Christians reject the idea that words and pronunciations have intrinsic power. God is just as good a "name" for the Creator as any other.

Copyright 2021, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for non-remunerated use (meaning, you don't make money by plagiarizing it). But please give credit where credit is due.

God's Name

Asked on Quora:

Why doesn’t the Christian “God” have a name, just “God”?

The purpose of a name is to distinguish one thing from other, similar things. We can call God “God” because no English-speaking, monotheistic person would confuse Him with somebody else. Nevertheless, God does have a chosen name (as well as many descriptive names that I won't go into).

The Christian god is the Hebrew (Jewish) god, with details about His nature known more explicitly to Christians but denied by the Jewish faith. God is first called Elohim in Genesis 1:1. Elohim means gods (plural) or lords, so it is an early hint at the model that describes God as being one God who, using His creative power over even time and space, entered His creation as three Persons. But Elohim is a descriptive noun rather than a name.

The name YHWH first appears in Genesis chapter 2. It gets some explanation in Exodus chapter 3. As God commissioned Moses to return to Egypt to lead Israel out of slavery, Moses asked whom he should say sent him if the Israelites asked?

God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"

Whereas most names describe a person from a third-person perspective, I AM is in first person. God selected the name. This, and the meaning of the name, teaches several important lessons.

• Self-existence. No god came before Him, so no god had the authority to name Him.
• When God calls Himself I AM, He contrasts Himself against all other gods, who are not.
• The names of man-made gods usually have root words that single out a sole action or attribute. For example, Romans’ Saturn traces back to the word, satus, to sow, and Egyptians’ Horus traces back to a word that meant light. In contrast, I AM encompasses a balance of all positive attributes while implying the imaginary nature of man-made gods. 

I AM is, in Hebrew, YHWH. This is called the Tetragrammaton, which means four letters. Since ancient Hebrew had no letters representing vowels, the correct pronunciation was forgotten thousands of years ago. Some pronounce it Yahweh, but that is just a guess.

Now that you know that YHWH means I AM and Elohim means gods or lords, you can see that, back in Genesis chapter 2, where it calls God YHWH ELOHIM, the hint about God’s triune nature expands because the expression would mean I AM-GODS or I AM LORDS. (This is a name and title, not a sentence.) If we combine this information with many explicit statements that God is the only one who is, by nature, a god, then a mystery forms that only the doctrine of the Trinity solves.

The Jews came to believe that God’s name was so holy that they began refusing to even say it. That contributed to why the pronunciation was forgotten. When reading scriptures, they began substituting Adonai, which means Lord.

The translators of the Authorized Version (the actual name of the King James Bible) could have used YHWH, or they could have translated it I AM. But one cannot be pronounced, and the other causes confusion when plugged into sentences. So they continued the Hebrew practice by translating it the LORD (with all capital letters).

Therefore, in the hundreds of places you see the LORD in your Bible, it actually represents YHWH, the name that God chose for Himself. For example, I am the LORD, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, nor My praise to graven images (Isaiah 42:8).

In the dark ages, Christians translated the Old Testament from Hebrew to Latin. Latin lacks a Y, so they changed it to a J; and Latin lacks a W, so they changed it to a V. That turned it into JHVH.

There was an old practice of using the vowels from Hebrew Adonai. So a Roman Catholic monk transformed the word into Jahovah. The first Bibles produced with a printing press published it as Jehovah, and that stuck.

Christianity is not like sorcery, wherein words have magical power in themselves (or so it is claimed). The understanding and the intent of the heart are what’s important.

Certain sects that make a big deal out of calling God Yahweh or Jehovah, or about using the Hebrew or Aramaic pronunciations of Jesus appeal to people with low biblical literacy or people so focused on micro-minutiae that they miss the big picture.  If we were Hebrew-speaking Jews reading a Hebrew Bible, sure, the pronunciation would matter.

But most of us are English-speaking gentiles, and there’s no crime in using the LORD in place of the name, YHWH, and no advantage in using a word that we do not know how to pronounce and the average person would not understand.