Jehovah: The Name of God in the Bible and What Witnesses Teach

Ask a Jehovah's Witness why their faith carries that name, and the conversation will not stay on the name of the religion for long. It will move to the name of God himself. Witnesses teach that God has a personal name, that the Bible uses it thousands of times, and that knowing and using it is part of a respectful relationship with him.

Other Bible readers may go years without hearing that name spoken in church, because most translations print a title in its place. So where does "Jehovah" come from, and why does this one name matter so much to Witnesses?

The four letters: the Tetragrammaton

In the Hebrew Scriptures — the part of the Bible Christians call the Old Testament — God's personal name appears as four Hebrew consonants, commonly written in English letters as YHWH. Scholars call these four letters the Tetragrammaton, from Greek words meaning "four letters."

Witnesses teach that the name appears nearly 7,000 times in the Hebrew text, far more often than titles such as "God" or "Lord." In their understanding, a name used that frequently was meant to be known and used, not hidden. The name appears at moments of introduction and covenant, including the account where God speaks to Moses and explains that earlier patriarchs knew him in a different way:

And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.

Exodus 6:3 (KJV)

The King James Version, one of the translations Faith Map ships, keeps the name in this verse and in a handful of others. The best-known may be Psalm 83:18, where the psalmist asks that people come to know God:

That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.

Psalm 83:18 (KJV)

For Witnesses, verses like these show that the name is not a minor detail of translation. They point to it as God's own self-introduction.

Jehovah or Yahweh: the pronunciation question

Here an honest complication belongs in any explanation. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels in these manuscripts, and out of reverence Jewish tradition long ago stopped pronouncing the name aloud, substituting other words when reading. Because of that, the original pronunciation of YHWH was not preserved with certainty.

Many scholars today consider "Yahweh" the most likely ancient pronunciation, and some translations use it. "Jehovah," by contrast, is a form that developed centuries ago as readers combined the consonants of the name with vowel sounds associated with the substituted title, and it became the familiar form in English, appearing in hymns, literature, and early English Bibles.

Witnesses teach that "Jehovah" is the best-known English rendering of God's name, and they use it for the same reason, they explain, that familiar English forms are used for other Bible names whose ancient pronunciation differed — no one insists on the original Hebrew sounds for names like Jeremiah or Jesus in everyday English.

Why most translations say LORD instead

If the name appears so often, why do most Bibles a reader picks up today show "the LORD," in capital or small capital letters, instead of a name?

The practice follows the older reading tradition. Because the name was treated as too sacred to pronounce, readers substituted the Hebrew word for "Lord," and Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures generally used their word for "Lord" as well. Most modern English translations continue that convention, using LORD as a signal: where you see it in capitals, the Hebrew text underneath has the Tetragrammaton.

Witnesses teach that this well-meant convention has an unfortunate effect. A title can describe many beings — there are many lords in the Bible's world — while a name identifies one person. Replacing the name, in their view, makes God seem more distant and obscures how often the text speaks of him by name. Readers of other traditions value the reverence behind the convention.

The New World Translation and restoring the name

The Witnesses' own Bible translation, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, takes the opposite approach to most versions. It restores "Jehovah" throughout, using the name wherever the Tetragrammaton appears in the Hebrew text — some 6,828 times in that portion by the translation's own count — rather than substituting a title.

Witnesses also teach that the name belongs in the Christian Greek Scriptures, the New Testament. Their reasoning, presented as their teaching, runs this way: the New Testament writers quoted the Hebrew Scriptures extensively, including passages where the Tetragrammaton stood in the original, and the earliest copies available to those writers would have contained it. On that basis their translation uses "Jehovah" in a number of New Testament passages where the Greek text has the word usually rendered "Lord," where they judge the context to refer to God. This is a distinctive feature of their translation and one readers should know they are encountering when they open it.

In Faith Map's Jehovah's Witness section, scripture reading is presented in the King James Version and the World English Bible, where the name appears in the verses noted above but LORD is otherwise the common rendering — a useful contrast that lets readers see both conventions side by side. Reading and lessons there are free; the app's prayer-library listening is free as well, while chapter-audio narration is a Plus feature.

Using God's name in prayer and daily speech

For Witnesses this is not only a question for translators. Witnesses teach that using God's name personally is part of worship: they address Jehovah in prayer by name, speak of him by name in conversation and in their preaching work, and understand that practice as following Bible prayers that invoke the name directly.

That is also why the movement's name is phrased as it is. "Jehovah's Witnesses" identifies whose witnesses they understand themselves to be — people who speak publicly about Jehovah, by name. When a Witness at your door uses the name frequently, it is not a verbal habit. It is, in their teaching, the point: a God who gave his name in scripture intends to be known by it, and known personally.

Your faith is beautiful, and for Witnesses, part of that beauty is that God is not anonymous.

In Faith Map, you can read the passages discussed here in context and follow the Witness track's lessons at your own pace.