lost in translation....jehovah

today, we learned about the name jehovah in class.  it was enlightening to say the least.  i already knew that the word "jehovah" wasn't really a correct term...but with what i learned today it just blows it out of the water.

okay..lesson time! mind you, this is real watered down so that folks can understand, so if you knew this already don't yell at me! back in the day ancient israelites didn't say the name of god.  it was seen as sacred. however, written down it would look like YHWH (we would say Yahweh...but they would NEVER say it).  the big name for this is the tetragrammaton.  so, instead of saying the sacred name of god, they instead would say adonai, or lord.  this is why the word LORD is written in small all caps in your bibles in the old testament.

the thing is, if someone is reading the scripture, someone might read that sacred name of god out loud by accident instead of saying adonai.  so, the jews devised a system where they took the vowels from the word adonai and put them around the tetragrammaton so that the reader would realize "AH HA! i'm suppose to say ADONAI and not the super sacred name of god!"  (now, the whole vowel thing might not make sense to you if you don't understand hebrew, but i'll have an example later on to demonstrate)

however....when christians came on the scene that didn't understand that, they tried to translate the word YHWH with the extra vowels placed in it.  and what did they get when they did that? JEHOVAH.  the word that the israelites used wasn't a word that was meant to be said, so they would've never said it.  not only would they have never said the tetragrammaton, the point of the special code was alert the reader to the fact that "hey, you see this word?  don't say it.  say this OTHER word instead."  sounding out the "code word" was never the point, so a jew would've never said "jehovah."

so, here's a example.  let's say that the word "run" is a special word to us.  it's sacred.  no one says it.  so, instead we decide that we're going to use the word "jog" in its place.  to make sure that no one says the word, we make up a special code that goes like this:  we put the "o" of the word "jog" after the "n" in "run."  it'll look like this:  "runo."  when you see that, you'll remember that you have to say jog instead of run.  we all get it.  everything's great.

then someone comes along and tries to translate our code.  but they don't understand it.  they just see the word "runo."  so, they figure that the word "runo" is our special word, because they never understood that "runo" was never meant to be a word by itself...but a way for a reader to understand that they need to say something else because our sacred word "run."

i hope that all made sense.

does that mean we should stop saying the word jehovah?  eh, i wouldn't go that far.  god knows we're talking about him.  but if anyone knows me, i like to be as precise as possible if something is important to me.  you more than likely won't hear it from me again unless its in a song that i have to sing.

i just think that learning stuff like this is cool because i like learning about my faith and where it came from.  we really should know more than we do.