Strange Things in the Scriptures (Jehovah)

Those of you who have read anything about how Bibles are translated, have probably read about how careful the Jews were to preserve the Hebrew (or Aramaic) text. Scribes went through strenuous training to insure the characters were written perfectly and without error in even one jot or tittle. (Two small Hebrew characters)

The main text used for the Old Testament is called the Masoretic Text named after a group of Hebrew scribes in the 6th through the 9th century A.D. who added certain vowel notations to the Hebrew text to preserve the pronunciation. The Hebrew written word does not contain vowels; one must know which vowels go in between the consonants. For example, the word "constant" would appear as "cnstnt."

To insure the language would survive as a spoken language, the Masorites developed a few markings around the consonants which would indicate what vowel to sound. The Jews were very superstitions about pronouncing the name of the Creator. Often even in modern times, Jews would spell God as G-d. Many legalistic Christians have taken this superstition and are also doing it.

The Jews on Sabbath usually have a reading from the Tanakh (Old Testament). To insure that no one accidentally read the name of the Creator accidentally aloud, they did not put in the vowel marking for YHVH. Instead, they put in the vowel markings for Adonai (Lord). This would tell the reader to say "Adonai" instead of the forbidden word "Yahweh."

When Christians play around in the Old Testament without the help of those who maintained the Book for all these years, embarrassing things can happen. The word "Jehovah" comes mixing the consonants from "YHVH" with the vowels from "Adonai." The word "Jehovah" is not a name for the deity of the Old Testament. The Jehovah's witnesses are witnessing for a non-existent God. We shouldn't chide them too much, however; the "inerrant" King James translators missed the mark as well. Most Bibles have made the corrections and swallowed their pride, not so for the Jehovah's Witnesses. nor the King James Bible publishers.