If you were to hear me preach from the Old Testament, you would hear me say “Yahweh” in the places where my NASB or ESV says “The Lord.” I’m often asked after services by visitors what Bible translation I use which uses Yahweh. I tell them I’m using theirs, and have them open to the front of their Bible.

The most arcane practice of English Bible translations is the use of “The Lord” for God’s name. It is a translation choice with zero scholarly merit, it confuses by creating artificial distance between the reader and the text, and is not defensible on any legitimate grounds. At best it is condescending, but more likely it is just simply superstitious.

If you were to hear me preach from the Old Testament, you would hear me say “Yahweh” in the places where my NASB or ESV says “The Lord.” I’m often asked after services by visitors what Bible translation I use which uses Yahweh. I tell them I’m using theirs, and have them open to the front of their Bible, and show them where it says something along the lines of:  

There is yet another name which is particularly assigned to God as His special or proper name, that is, the four letters YHWH. This name has not been pronounced by the Jews because of reverence for the great sacredness of the divine name. Therefore, it has been consistently translated Lord. It is known that for many years YHWH has been transliterated as Yahweh, however no certainty attaches to this pronunciation.

If you can train your mind to get over all the inaccuracies in that note (and it is bad—note the passive “assigned,” as if God was named by someone else; and how is different sized CAPS a form of translation?) you understand what the NASB editors are saying is that you are supposed to read Yahweh when you see them giving you The Lord. As if Christians have the decoder ring from The Christmas Story, and we can see through CAPS of varying fonts to the word “Yahweh.”

Let me briefly explain why translations say they do this, and then explain why they should stop.

First, some do this because they say we don’t know “with certainty” how YHWH was pronounced by the Jews of Moses’ day. But this misses the point. We don’t know with “certainty” how any of the Hebrew words were pronounced. I’m not even sure Yahweh spoke Hebrew to Adam in the garden anyway. How did Adam pronounce Eve? Is it the same way Americans do it? We can’t even agree on how to pronounce Isaiah, much less Yahweh. But the solution is not to render Isaiah as “ISH,” and it is certainly not to replace Isaiah with “The Prophet.”

Second, some translations say they do this to avoid offending the Jews, whom the translations tell us refuse to pronounce Yahweh because of “reverence for the great sacredness of the divine name.” Ha! Imagine the scene in John 8:58 when Jesus declared “before Abraham was, I am,” and the Jews picked up rocks to stone him. Now tell Jesus, “You know, they are rejecting you because of the great reverence they hold for the sacred name of Yahweh…you see, you vocalized the great Tetragrammaton, so they had no choice but to stone you…”

It is really bad translation practice to change something as fundamental as God’s name to avoid offending people who would simply prefer you not mention the name of Jesus’ God around them to begin with. Do we really think that the Pharisees of today are having their devo’s in the NASB? And if they are, I doubt it is the font size of The Lord that will cause them to reject Christ.

Third, some translations say they do this because everyone else does it. That is seriously the reasoning the NIV uses in their preface—which is ironic to say the least. This too shows a really bad translation philosophy when it comes to names. As my dad might have said when I was a kid “Everybody else is doing it” is just as much of a reason to not do something as it is to do something.

Why does this matter? For a few reasons:

God gave us his name, so we should use it. When God sends Moses to Israel, Moses tells God, “They are going to ask who sent me, and I’m going to have to give them a name…” (Exodus 3:13). God did not tell Moses—“I have a name, but I also have ten commandments, and one of them says not to take my name in vain, so you had better not say it, because then others might think you were taking it in vain.” Yet this is the exact logic used by those who refuse to print “Yahweh” out of some sort of superstitious fear.

God told Moses, “Tell them ‘I AM’ sent you” (Exodus 3:14). Then, later, he reiterates that while he had appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they did not learn his name (Exodus 6:3). But Moses and the Israelites are different, because he gives them the privilege of calling him “by my name, Yahweh.” Even the KJV uses “Jehovah” here, instead of The Lord. The point is obvious: God wants those with whom he is in a saving relationship to address him by his name, which he gives them. Frankly, it’s absurd to say that it’s improper to use the name that God himself gives. If he didn’t want us to use it, he wouldn’t have given it to us, and he certainly wouldn’t’ have commanded Moses to use it.

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