Names are important; without them we’d all be yelling “Hey you, in the green!” when we wanted to talk to someone, and everyone in green would think we were talking to them. It would be very confusing, not to mention loud. Maybe wearing something chartreuse would mitigate things, but only if others knew the difference between green and chartreuse. (Which in any event comes back to names, in this case the names of colors rather than people.)
Names can also be controversial. When word got out that my name was going to be an abbreviated form of a saint’s name,1 my mother got a letter from a nun announcing that she (my mother) simply couldn’t do that. It was an affront and a travesty and maybe even an abomination not to use the entire name. The fact my mother wasn’t in the Catholic church apparently did not enter into the discussion; it was simply wrong at a basic level.
In ancient cultures, they believed names had power; that if you knew someone’s name, that gave you power over them. God gave man dominion over the animals (Gen 1:28), but he also assigned to him the naming of them (2:20); the ancients saw a connection.
I’ve long seen that connection in one of Moses’ objections to God telling him to go to Pharaoh and free his (God’s) people. In the second of his “terrible toos” objections (too unqualified, too ignorant, etc.), Moses tells God, “I don’t even know your name, so I can’t tell them who sent me!” I suspect the “name=power” thing was in Moses’ head, and he assumed that God therefore wouldn’t tell him his name, and so Moses was safe from a future date with pharaoh. God, of course, met the objection straight on, just as he did all the other ones, by, gasp!, telling Moses his name. God not only told Moses his name, he told him in the next verse (Exod 3:15) to tell the Israelites who had sent him, and he begins with the name he’s just told Moses, and then ties that name to what they already know—he’s the God of their fathers, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and ends with “this is my name forever.” In other words, now that you know it, you should remember it, because I’m going to be around awhile.
But our Bibles don’t have God’s name in that verse. They have a title: “The LORD.” A title is a very different thing from a name. At the end of a traditional marriage ceremony, two things happen: first, the couple is pronounced “husband and wife.” Those are titles. But then they’re introduced as “John and Jane Smith”; those are names. Imagine skipping the second part, and just going through your entire marriage calling each other “Husband” and “Wife.” And yet that’s precisely what the Old Testament portion of our Bibles do—they go through the entire book and never once use God’s actual name.
I’ve found that odd for a long time, but the older I get the more annoying it gets.2 What makes it more annoying over time is that the more you read the Old Testament, the more you discover that it talks about God’s name. Like, a lot. And, when what’s mentioned is instead a title, it makes the mention of his name a little nonsensical.
For the LORD will not abandon His people on account of His great name, because the LORD has been pleased to make you a people for Himself.
1 Sam 12:22
That sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it, not using his name when the whole reason stated for his not abandoning his people is because of that “great name”?
In Isaiah 40, at the beginning of the great passage about waiting for … you know, God’s name … Isaiah gets sarcastic with the complainers before he moves on to the more important theme of the strength that comes from waiting.
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The creator of the ends of the earth, the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, does not become weary or tired.
Isaiah 40:28
Right, that’s not what He said. He centered that triptych on God’s name—hey, bozos, the God that created everything, you know, your God, the one named …, the Holy One of Israel? Yeah, here’s a news flash—he doesn’t get tired.
I am the LORD, that is My name…
Isaiah 42:8
I mean, that’s not his name, which makes the mention of it minimally amusing but maximally confusing.
Of course, the obvious question is why don’t our Bibles use God’s name? Since I don’t happen to know anyone on a translation committee personally (if you do, give them a shout and let me know what they say), I can’t answer the question with any authority, but there are a few possibilities (see the interwebs), and I don’t find any of them compelling. For example, observant Jews don’t care what you call God any more than they care that you write it “God” instead of “G-d.” So, when God gives us his name, let’s actually use it. I know, call me crazy.
Hebrew, famously, doesn’t have vowels in the original manuscripts, so God’s name is just four consonants—YHWH—known in theological circles as the tetragrammaton. (Theologians love to use really big, usually Greek, words for something simple: tetragrammaton means, wait for it—“four letters”.)
The actual pronunciation is a bit problematic. In the old days when my grandparents were alive they used Jehovah, in spite of there being no J in Hebrew (all those Js you see in your Bible are actually Ys in the original languages). The story is that early on (1500’s) translators were led astray by the false vowel pointing that the Masoretes had used on God’s name to prevent it from being pronounced (the Masoretes preferred not to say it at all on the off chance they might take it in vain; they took their second commandment very seriously). These days, the consensus is that it is probably pronounced Yahweh, although not the way Americans say it, since Hebrew words are generally accented on the last syllable (YahWEH, not YAHweh), and definitely not the way my fellow Texans say it (Ya-Way!).
For Yahweh will not abandon His people on account of His great name, because Yahweh has been pleased to make you a people for Himself.
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The creator of the ends of the earth, Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, does not become weary or tired.
I am Yahweh, that is my name…
This not only makes the scripture make a lot more sense, it also reminds us that God is personal; he wants us to know him. At the end of Psalm 91, he says:
I will set him securely on high, because he has known my name… (emphasis added)
If you discover you like it (and you will, I promise), options are almost nonexistent. The Holman Christian Standard Bible was the first one I encountered a few years ago; it didn’t use Yahweh everywhere, but it did use it some where, which was an improvement over every other translation. Unfortunately, when it was updated a few years later, the “Holman” (now it’s just CSB) and “Yahweh” were banished, along with with several other things that made the HCSB stand out from the crowd. Oh well.
More recently (this is not an advertisement, just information), the Legacy Standard Bible was released by a combination of the Lockman Foundation (keepers of the New American Standard) and John MacArthur. It is an update to the NASB 1995 (different than Lockman’s own update, called NASB 2020; yeah, I know, Bible translations are weird, just go with it) and among the LSB updates was the decision to use Yahweh everywhere God’s name appears. I’m not particularly a fan of MacArthur, and the translation update is not notable in any other way (I would much prefer to just have the NASB 1995 with Yahweh instead of “the LORD”), but it’s nice to read the name, and it did at least start with NASB 1995.
There’s a similar problem in the New Testament portion of our Bibles, where, again, our Bibles pass off a title for a name. And we’ve followed suit.
You probably know that “Christ” in English is the transliteration of the Greek Χριστός, i.e. “Christos”. You probably also know that Χριστός is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word mashiach3, which we know in English as messiah. And you probably even know that mashiach means “anointed one.”
Which is precisely how the word is translated in the Old Testament! Everywhere! See, e.g., Lev 4:3, 5, 16; 1 Sam 2:10; Ps 2:2, 18:50, and many other places. Yes, some translations (I’m looking at you NASB) translate it “Messiah” in its two occurrences in Daniel, which is precisely why I’ve been saying for years that every translation is a commentary. (Similar things happen elsewhere; the Greek “myriads of myriads” is translated as, wait for it, “myriads of myriads” in Rev 5:11, but the Greek “two myriads of myriads” is almost always translated “200 million” in Rev 9:16. Why? John certainly didn’t mean anything different by the two usages, except, you know, “infinity squared!”, but there are all sorts of agendas in translation, hence the word, commentary. But I digress.)
Messiach is translated as “anointed one” in the OT, but its equivalent Christos is transliterated as “Christ” in the NT. And just like using a title for God instead of his name in the OT causes him to be less personal, the same is true here—Jesus is his name, and it’s what we should use when we talk about him. We only need “Christ” when we’re referring to the fact that Jesus is the anointed one, and, let’s face it, that’s a maybe once a year occurrence for most of us, and when it happens, we should use “anointed one” to make it clear that’s what we mean. (Although people may know intellectually that “Christ” means “anointed one,” no one hears “anointed one” when we say “Christ.”)
It is in Paul’s letters we find most of the occurrences of “Christ as last name” (again, thanks not to Paul but to the translators not translating). Paul had good reasons for that that we don’t have: he was Jewish; much (sometimes most) of his audience was Jewish; and because of those two things Paul often wanted to emphasize that Jesus was the anointed one (Messiah). Further, his audience didn’t hear “last name” when he used the word, they heard what the word meant: “anointed one.” When Paul talks about “Jesus the Anointed One” and “The Anointed One Jesus” and “the Anointed One” it made perfect sense to them, and a lot of Paul would make more sense to us (and we wouldn’t get into the weeds with some of Paul’s messages) if we started hearing it that way, too.
Unfortunately, as with YHWH, finding a Bible translation that actually does the job of translating Χριστός is almost impossible.
The good news is that we can say whatever we want to say in our heads (as long as it stays there). So train yourself when you read “the LORD” in your Bible to say “YahWEH” in your head, and when you read “Christ” in your Bible to say “Anointed One” in your head. You’ll be surprised the difference it makes in how you see God, how you see Jesus, and the additional clarity it brings to what those Biblical authors are actually saying. If you do it when you’re reading your Bible out loud, too, you’ll start getting lots of questions about what translation you’re using, and then let the fun begin!
Before things get out of hand, though, I think we’re safe in sticking with “rose.”
- The patron saint of sarcasm, of course.
- You too will discover that lots of things get more annoying as you get older, including the fact they keep reducing the size of the fonts in books, and teenage drivers, where by “teenage” I mean anyone under the age of fifty.
- No Hebrew for you; mixing RTL and LTR languages in a blog post is a recipe for disaster.