Is Jehovah God’s True Name?
Excerpted from Michael L. Brown, What Do Jewish People Think About Jesus?


The name Jehovah is actually based on a mistaken reading of the biblical text by medieval Christian scholars who were educated in the Hebrew language but were not aware of certain Jewish scribal customs. In short, they did not realize that it was a Jewish tradition to write the vowels for the word ’adonai, Lord, with the consonants for the name Yahweh, known as the tetragrammaton, and they wrongly read this hybrid word as Yehowah, or Jehovah in English. That is to say, the name Jehovah (or Yehowah) did not exist in Israel—despite the popularity of this name in English-speaking, Christian circles, and despite religious organizations like Jehovah’s Witnesses.


Before getting into more specifics about the original pronunciation of God’s name, YHWH, let me explain the Jewish scribal custom known as qere-ketiv (pronounced q’rey, k’teev), Aramaic for “read” and “it is written.” This practice included several different scribal customs, including: (1) the practice of not reading certain words that were considered objectionable in the biblical Hebrew text and replacing them with less offensive words in their place; and (2) the practice of replacing one reading of a word with a variant reading of that same word, normally reflecting a minor difference in spelling or grammar. An example of the former would be the reading of the verb “lie with” (Hebrew shakab) for the verb “ravish” (Hebrew shagal). This occurs four times in the Tanakh, Deuteronomy 28:30; Isaiah 13:16; Jeremiah 3:2; and Zechariah 14:2, which is why the NIV translates with “ravish” (as written in the Hebrew text) but in an ancient synagogue, the marginal text with “lie with” would have been read. In this case, “ravish” would be the ketiv, what is written in the main Hebrew text, while “lie with” would be the qere, the word to be read in place of what is written. An example of the latter would be the substitution of the plural form of a word for the singular form, or, to use English as an example, substituting the spelling “color” for “colour.” These types of substitutions occur frequently. Again, the substituted form is the qere while the replaced form is the ketiv.


How did the Jewish scribes indicate this? In some manuscripts, the word to be replaced (the ketiv, the word written in the main text) would be left without vowels, which would be quite conspicuous. Then, in the margin of the text, the qere would be written in full (that is, with both consonants and vowels). In other manuscripts, the consonants of the word in the text (ketiv) would be preserved but the vowels of the word to be read in its place (qere) would be substituted, creating a hybrid form, while the consonants of the qere word would be written in the margin.


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