How do we know for sure that YHWH should be translated Jehovah?

Answer 1

True Christians (such as Jehovah's Witnesses) do not pretend to know "for sure that YHWH should be translated Jehovah".

Learn more:
http://watchtower.org/e/na/

Answer 2

The original hebrew was the letters yod, heh, vav, heh. Which is the English equivalent to YHWH. ( יהוה )

When the Bible was originally translated from it original Language, it was translated into German. In latin the letter 'J' is used to make the 'Y' sound.

Also, at that time, it was believed that the Vav was pronounced as is in modern times. Research has proven it to sound out to a 'W' sound now. Well when it was translated into English finally, it became JHVH, hence Jehovah.

Technically it should be YahWeh. But we don't have the vowels, because Hebrew didn't contain vowels back then.

When I say technically, mind you that I am saying an equivalent. YHWH, who knows what the vowels are. It could have been Yahooh (no pun intended), because the vav is used to represent an 'oo' sound, an 'oh' sound, a 'v' sound, and a 'w' sound. Ahh...

Answer 3

No human can be certain how it was originally pronounced in Hebrew because Hebrew was originally written with all consonants and no vowels. When the language was in everday use readers easily provided the proper vowels. Centuries later Jewish scholars developed a system of points which indicate which vowels to use when reading ancient Hebrew but they put the vowels for the substitute expression around the consonants representing the divine name. Thus the original pronunciation for the divine name was lost. Many scholars favor the expression Yahweh but it is uncertain and their is not agreement among them.However, Jehovah is the form of the name that is most readily recognized because it has been used in English for centuries and preserves equally with other forms the Hebrew Tetragrammaton.

Answer 4

Should God's name be in the NT?

Wolfgang Feneberg comments in the Jesuit magazine Entschluss/Offen (April 1985): “He [Jesus] did not withhold his father’s name YHWH from us, but he entrusted us with it. It is otherwise inexplicable why the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer should read: ‘May your name be sanctified!’” Feneberg further notes that “in pre-Christian manuscripts for Greek-speaking Jews, God’s name was not paraphrased with kýrios [Lord], but was written in the tetragram form [YHWH] in Hebrew or archaic Hebrew characters. . . . We find recollections of the name in the writings of the Church Fathers;

Professor George Howard of the University of Georgia wrote: “Since the Tetragram [four Hebrew letters for the divine name] was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text.”—Journal of Biblical Literature, March 1977, p. 77.

“In pre-Christian Greek [manuscripts] of the O[ld] T[estament], the divine name (yhwh) was not rendered by ‘kyrios’ [lord] as has often been thought. Usually the Tetragram was written out in Aramaic or in paleo-Hebrew letters. . . . At a later time, surrogates [substitutes] such as ‘theos’ [God] and ‘kyrios’ replaced the Tetragram . . . There is good reason to believe that a similar pattern evolved in the N[ew] T[estament], i.e. the divine name was originally written in the NT quotations of and allusions to the OT, but in the course of time it was replaced by surrogates.”—“New Testament Abstracts,” 3, 1977, p. 306.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Volume 2, page 649) says: “One of the most fundamental and essential features of the biblical revelation is the fact that God is not without a name: he has a personal name, by which he can, and is to be, invoked.” Jesus certainly had that name in mind when he taught his followers to pray: “Our Father in the heavens, let your name be sanctified.”—Matthew 6:9.


German professor Gustav Friedrich Oehler discussed various pronunciations and concluded: “From this point onward I use the word Jehovah, because, as a matter of fact, this name has now become more naturalized in our vocabulary, and cannot be supplanted.”—Theologie des Alten Testaments (Theology of the Old Testament), second edition, published in 1882, page 143.

Similarly, in his Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique (Grammar of Biblical Hebrew), 1923 edition, in a footnote on page 49, Jesuit scholar Paul Joüon states: “In our translations, instead of the (hypothetical) form Yahweh, we have used the form Jéhovah . . . which is the conventional literary form used in French.”


Jehovah, Jesus, Jeremiah, Jehu, etc all come from German.

Our english bibles come by way of Germany, thus the German spellings of Hebrew names.

Answer 5

We don't There are no vowels in YHWH...It is a guess in line with how speech was formulated.

Answer 6

remember back in the first century, they did not use
vowels in the Hebrew Language, so being translated
to the english language that is how it would be
translated.

Psalms 83:18...........