Why is LORD capitals ,often in the First Testament, ? Why is Lord lower case ? often in the New Testament?

Question

Thanks.

Answer 1

In old times, the Hebrews would use marks to replace the vowels around their consonant letters, such as C, H, K, L, M, etc., to make it shorter text space, or easier text writing, and the marks in certain positions would help to pronunciate the word correctly. Then, after a while, they stopped putting the vowel pronunciation marks around the name of God, because they deemed the name of God to be too Holy to write or speak. So, his proper name was not spoken or written correctly. Today, there is no extant work which shows the vowel markings in order to pronounce the name of God correctly, which is the letter YHWH. This is written right-to-left, because that is the way Hebrew was written, so it would have appeared to us as HWHY. You have to read it backward.
When the different scribe groups copied the older texts, they replaced the name YHWH with the name Adonai or Elohim, either by the Priestly caste of Jews or the Elohist caste of Jews, which both contributed to the work which we have numerous translations of today. Adonai and Elohim were replaced with LORD in all upper case letters in the Old Testament to allow the reader who is familiar with this history to know that the TetraGrammaton (means "4-Letters" in Greek) was what was originally the word before the translation.
In the New Testament, the Lord, with only the first letter in uppercase, signifies Jesus Christ, where Lord is the Title, and the reader will see that is referring to Jesus Christ.
Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Hebrew does not have capitalization at all. The Greek manuscript for the King James would essentially have been like "all capital letters".

When the English translators in the King James and slightly earlier era were doing their work from the original Hebrew, they found several variations on titles for God. Yahweh or Jehovah is one Adonai, another, and they differentiated from a ruler (also a type of "Lord") as well.

Lord in the New Testament is translated from the Greek, no Hebrew, and they used the normative English capitalization to differentiate between Christ -- the Lord in the New Testament, and Jehovah, the LORD in the old testament. Those who believe in the pre-incarnate Christ believe him to be Jehovah, by the way.

Answer 3

LORD in capital letters is for when the translator replaced the name of God (Jehovah) with the title LORD.
The reason? When Bible translators, began translating the Hebrew texts (long after Jesus and his disciples had died), the later translators, re-adapted the ancient Jewsih practice of using the title LORD (Adonai) for the name Jehovah, following an ancient Jewish superstition of not saying God's name out loud.

Answer 4

In the OT LORD is used in place of the tetragrammaton. The tetragrammaton is the letters YHWH. This is the name of God. Jews would not write the full name of God because the feared someone might deface or dishonor it. In the NT when we see Lord it is referring to Jesus in most cases.

Answer 5

LORD is a reverant replacement for JHVH which is God's covenant name used in the Old Testiment Hebrew. In the New Testiment the word is translated as Master,or Lord. I hope this helps.

Answer 6

The "LORD" translation of the Old Testament was their translation of the Hebrew "YHWH," which was God's sacred OT name. It was capitalized because of what the translators believed to be supreme holiness.

Answer 7

As Edge and others have said, except the high priests did write the name, but only after a stringent cleansing ritual.

Answer 8

They explain that before Genesis at the beginning of the book. They did that for various reasons depending upon your translation.

Answer 9

Editor's choice.

Answer 10

I think with capitials designates God and without it Jesus