“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Dt 6:4-5).
You may have seen these lines in writing and wondered why
“LORD” is written in all capital letters. The following video seeks to answer
this question.
That name is God’s personal name; this is how God
introduced Himself to Moses in the third chapter of Exodus. God is wanting to
free His people from Egyptian enslavement and Moses asks God what name he
should use when people ask who is doing this miraculous rescue. God commands
Moses to tell them that “EHYEH” has sent him. EHYEH means “I will be” and
connotes the idea that God is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing. It would
be pretty weird, though, for Moses to go to people and say, “I will be” so God
also tells Moses to use the name of “YAHWEH”, which communicates that this is
the God of their ancestors and means “He will be”.
YAHWEH appears over 6,500 times in the Hebrew Old
Testament.
Over time as the people of God read Scripture, they took to
using the name “Adonai” instead of “YAHWEH.” Adonai simply means “Lord” (not
the lower case letters) and the use of this term has been used for centuries
right up to our modern time. Ancient scribes were so concerned about not
spelling out YAHWEH, that they developed a unique scribal reminder to ensure
that this would not happen. They would take out the vowels within YAHWEH and
insert the vowels from ADONAI thereby producing the name YAHOWAH.
This is how the term
JEHOVAH became prominent in our English versions of scripture.
Watch the video
to learn more interesting facts about the name of God.
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