REVISED EDITION
POSTED 03 FEBRUARY, 2004

Sacred Name Concerns

by J.K. McKee
editor@tnnonline.net

How many of you have been in a Messianic religious setting as of late where you have heard someone use the words God, or Lord, or even Jesus Christ—and then someone gets up and publicly chastises the person? How many of you have been told that if you do not use Hebraic names and terms for the Father and the Son that your prayers will neither be heard nor answered? How many of you have seen people forget the love and compassion of our Savior, and whose faith is now tied up in pronouncing His name “correctly”?

Sadly, these sorts of occurrences are becoming more and more commonplace in certain sectors of the Messianic community. As our Heavenly Father is in the process of restoring His people, many have taken the message of Torah obedience and have abused it. They have removed the message from its original, First Century Jewish context, and are doing things that are foreign to the orthopraxy of the Apostles. In so doing, they have brought disrepute to the Messianic movement and a foul spirit into the camp. They have defamed the name of God, rather than respect it.

For centuries, Satan has done his best to divide those who claim to believe in the God of Israel, Creator of Heaven and Earth. In our day, the enemy is trying to stall or discredit the restoration of Israel. Unfortunately, our enemy’s tactics have all too often succeeded. One such issue that the Adversary has used to divide the Body of Messiah in recent days has been the Sacred Name controversy. He has done his job quite well.

Some are not familiar with what the Sacred Name issue is, while others are all too knowledgeable. In this article we will discuss various aspects surrounding this debate, including: what the Divine Name of God is, various interpretations and views of the Third Commandment, titles for our Creator used in Scripture, where the English name Jesus really comes from, and concerns that we have in regard to this divisive subject. Our goal is to gain a scholastic perspective that encourages Believers to follow the example of the Apostles, who lived within the framework of Second Temple Judaism. Our ministry is concerned about the credibility of the Messianic movement, and we believe that there has been a strong lack of Biblical scholarship in this area, both linguistic and historical.

What is the issue?

In regard to the Father’s name, the issue at hand is that one has to decide whether or not it is appropriate to verbalize His proper name which is given to us in the Hebrew Bible. It is composed of the four Hebrew letters yud (y), hey (h), vav (w), hey (h): hwhy, equivalent of the English letters YHVH or YHWH. They compose what is commonly called the “tetragrammaton,” a term meaning “a word of four letters.”

In almost all major English Bible translations of the Tanach or Old Testament, the tetragrammaton has been rendered as “the LORD.” Some Jewish Bibles use the term “HASHEM” meaning “the Name.” Customarily in Bible translation, proper names are always transliterated, meaning that their sounds are communicated as closely as possible from one language into another, but titles are always translated. Yet in the case of the name YHWH most English Bibles have rendered it as a title. The preface to the New American Standard Bible states the following:

The Proper Name of God in The Old Testament: In the Scriptures, the name of God is most significant and understandably so. It is inconceivable to think of spiritual matters without a proper designation for the Supreme Deity. Thus the most common name for the Deity is God, a translation of the original Elohim. One of the titles for God is Lord, a translation of Adonai. There is yet another name with is particularly assigned to God as His special or proper name, that is, the four letters YHWH (Exodus 3:14 and Isaiah 42:8). This name has not been pronounced by the Jews because of reverence for the great sacredness of the divine name. Therefore, it has been consistently translated LORD. The only exception to this translation of YHWH is when it occurs in immediate proximity to the word Lord, that is, Adonai. In that case it is regularly translated GOD in order to avoid confusion.

It is known that for many years YHWH has been transliterated as Yahweh, however no complete certainty attaches to this pronunciation.[1]

As Exodus 20:7 reads in the NASU: “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.” If the tetragrammaton were transliterated into the text, as it is in the New Jerusalem Bible, then the verse reads, “You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh your God, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished anyone who misuses his name.” “Yahweh” is the most common form used by theologians today for hwhy, other than just the letters YHWH. Many scholastic works and commentaries will use the form “Yahweh” in their description of Ancient Israelite religion.

This Christian Bible translation says that the name YHWH is rendered as Lord because of Judaism’s reverence for the Divine Name of the Supreme Deity. The NASU translators followed a long-standing tradition of not pronouncing the name of God founded centuries ago in Judaism. One widely respected Jewish translation of the Tanach (Old Testament), the ArtScroll Tanach, renders hwhy not as LORD, but HASHEM, meaning “the Name.” Its translators tell us, “In this work, the Four-Letter Name of God is translated ‘HASHEM,’ the pronunciation traditionally used for the Name to avoid pronouncing it unnecessarily.”[2]

A third, but more liberal view of why YHWH is not used in most Bible translations, is stated in the preface to the Revised Standard Version. It says, “the use of any proper name for the one and only God, as though there were other gods from whom he had to be distinguished, was discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is entirely inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian Church.”[3] Some may take issue with the statement that it is “entirely inappropriate for the universal faith” for our Creator to be designated by a proper name. However, it is historically accurate that the speaking of the name of God aloud was discontinued in Judaism long before the time of Yeshua, as commonly speaking the name of God was considered synonymous with defaming it. Martin Rose comments that “Judaism had secured that the divine name should not be profaned any more. The divine name, once the ‘distinguishing mark’ of divine presence and immanence, had become the essence of God’s unapproachable holiness so that in the Jewish tradition ‘the Name’ (haššēm) could be synonymous with ‘God’” (ABD).[4]

The primary debate surrounding this issue has many factors. How do we pronounce the name YHWH? What does the Third Commandment truly tell us? Should we even be using the Divine Name?

Secondary debates include what the given Hebrew name of the Messiah is, and whether or not it is necessary to know the specific name YHWH for a person to be saved.

J.K. McKee (B.A., University of Oklahoma; M.A., Asbury Theological Seminary) is the editor of TNN Online (www.tnnonline.net) and is a Messianic apologist. He is a 2009 recipient of the Zondervan Biblical Languages Award for Greek. He is author of numerous books, dealing with a wide range of topics that are important for today’s Messianic Believers. He has also written many articles on theological issues, and is presently focusing his attention on Messianic commentaries of various books of the Bible.

NOTES

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