Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Point of Interest: Why is LORD in all caps in some places?

Concerning terms that refer to God in the Old Testament: God, the Maker of heaven and earth, introduced himself to the people of Israel with the special, personal name, whose consonants are YHWH (see Exodus 3:14–15). Scholars call this the “Tetragrammaton,” a Greek term referring to the four Hebrew letters YHWH. The exact pronunciation of YHWH is uncertain, because the Jewish people considered the personal name of God to be so holy that it should never be spoken aloud. Instead of reading the word YHWH, they would normally read the Hebrew word adonai (“Lord”), and the ancient translations into Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic also followed suit. When the vowels of the word adonai are placed with the consonants of YHWH, this results in the familiar word Jehovah that was used in some earlier English Bible translations. As is common among English translations today, this usually renders the personal name of God (YHWH) with the word LORD (printed in small capitals). An exception to this is when the Hebrew word adonai appears together with YHWH, in which case the two words are rendered together as “the Lord [in lower case] God [in small capitals].” In contrast to the personal name for God (YHWH), the more general name for God in Old Testament Hebrew is ʾelohim and its related forms of ʾel or ʾeloah, all of which are normally translated “God” (in lower case letters). The use of these different ways to translate the Hebrew words for God is especially beneficial to the English reader, enabling the reader to see and understand the different ways that the personal name and the general name for God are both used to refer to the One True God of the Old Testament.
The Holy Bible : English Standard Version. 2001. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

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