God has a Name!
It is not "God," "the LORD," "Adonai," or "Hashem"
He has a name, and it is in what Christian’s call the Old Testament over 6,800 times. In almost every English translation of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament/Tanakh, the name has been removed, replaced with “the LORD” or “GOD.” If you look at a concordance, you will find that underlying “the LORD” or “GOD” is YHVH (some say YHWH), or in Hebrew, יְהוָֹה, the Tetragrammaton, Yehovah. Some are afraid of mispronouncing it, so they will not say it at all. Others will say that His name is too holy to pronounce. If that is true, why did Yeshua/Jesus, say in John 17:26 (NASB):
“and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”
This verse is out of a prayer to His Father. The “Your” in this verse is His Father, Yehovah. If Yeshua made His Father’s name known to his disciples, why do so few of his disciples today know it? Why do few use it?
Maybe the fourth commandment offers a reason. Exodus 20:7 (NIV) says:
“You shall not misuse the name of
the LORDYehovah your God, forthe LORDYehovah will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”
Some might feel that if they never actually use His name that they cannot misuse it. Is this acceptable? Consider Exodus 3:15 (NIV),
“God also said to Moses, ‘Say to the Israelites, “
The LORDYehovah, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you. This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.”’”
It appears to me that He commanded that we are to call Him by name. Does that apply to us? It says, or should I say, “He says, ‘from generation to generation.’” I think that continues to us!
I used to attend a church that occasionally did child dedications. The pastor would bless the children with the blessing from Numbers 6:24-26 (NIV):
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;
the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace
Have you ever read the next verse after this blessing? Let us consider verse 27 (NIV),
“So they will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.”
Where in the blessing above is His name? It has been removed! He says when His name is placed on them, He “will bless them.” His name was never invoked to confer the blessing. Let us correct the blessing:
Yehovah bless you and keep you;
Yehovah make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;
Yehovah turn his face toward you and give you peace
Now His name is back in its rightful place. When this blessing is given, His name is put on the receiver of the blessing and then He can bless them. By not using the name, the blessing is stolen!
Was His name ever spoken? Let us go back to the time of the judges and consider Ruth 2:4:
Just then Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and said to the harvesters, “The LORD be with you.”
“The LORD bless you,” they replied.
Now that you know that the translation is hiding His name, we should translate it properly:
Just then Boaz arrived from Bethlehem and said to the harvesters, “Yehovah be with you.”
“Yehovah bless you,” they replied.
In the Hebrew text of this verse you will find יְהוָֹה, YHVH. The translators chose to deliberately change the text to hide the Name. These are quotes of what Boaz and the harvesters actually said. The author of Ruth had available to him “Adonai,” or “Hashem” if that was what was said, but that is not what the text has. It has the Father’s actual name. Boaz and the harvesters spoke it and greeted each other in His name.
“The LORD” and “GOD” hides YHVH when translated from the original Hebrew. How exactly do you pronounce YHVH since there are no vowels given. Hebrew has twenty-two letters, all consonants. In the English alphabet twenty-six letters include vowels as well as consonants. In English, and other languages, the spelling of words includes the vowels, not so with Hebrew. Without vowels, it is difficult, if not impossible, to pronounce YHVH. So, what are the vowels that allow us to pronounce the name? Dr. Nehemia Gordon and his team have studied Hebrew manuscripts from around the world searching for the correct vowel pointings, nikud, for the name of God, the Tetragrammaton. They have found thousands of manuscripts that have all three vowels, Shva, Holam and Kamatz. Many manuscripts omit the Holam, but there are thousands that have all three. These are consistent and there are no other variations of the vowels found when searching the manuscripts. The Shva is either silent or has the sound of the “e” in yellow. The Holam is a long “o” as in hole. The Kamatz makes the “ah” sound as in awesome. The accent should be in the final syllable so the pronunciation would be YehoVAH.
YHVH is not just four “random” letters, there is a meaning. It is assembled from three Hebrew words. Hayah meaning “He was,” Hoveh meaning “He is,” and Yiheyeh meaning “He will be.” His name means “the one who was, who is, and is to come.” Past, present and future: the Great I AM. Consider Revelation 1:8 (NIV):
“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord
GodYehovah, ‘who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.’”
(The image above is from the Project Truth Ministries @ProjectTruthMinistries channel on YouTube. There is a lot of great content there, go check it out.)
Dr. Nehemia Gordon has videos on his YouTube channel @Nehemiaswall where you can dive deeper into this. Keith Johnson of BFA International also has videos discussing this subject on his channel @Bfainternationalministry. Dr. Gordon wrote a book that I highly recommend, Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence: The Hebrew Power of the Priestly Blessing Unleashed, and Keith Johnson has a great book, His Hallowed Name Revealed Again, both available on Amazon that go deep into the Name.
What about the name of the Son of Yehovah? Most English Bibles today have the name as Jesus. He walked the earth about 2,000 years ago but was definitely not known by that name at that time. We know this because, Hebrew has no “J” sound in its aleph bet (alphabet). Additionally, the hard “J” sound did not exist in English until about 400 to 500 years ago. The Bible that the Pilgrams had on the Mayflower, the Geneva Bible, did not have the name Jesus in it, it had “Iefus” (See Figure 1). If you said “Jesus” to a Pilgram, he may not have even known what you were talking about.
Figure 1 Geneva Bible, Romans 1:3
Christians today believe that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew (with a little Aramaic) and the New Testament was written in Greek. Is that true? Does it really make sense? The people that wrote the New Testament were all Hebrews, more specifically Israelites, mostly from the tribe of Judah (though we know that Paul Sha’ul, was from the tribe of Benjamin, since he told us). These men were in the synagogue every Sabbath Shabbat where there was reading from the Torah scrolls (Acts 15), all written in Hebrew. These were native Hebrew speakers, Greek was not their first language, if they spoke it at all.
In Luke 1 we can read about when the angel Gabriel visited Mary and informed her that she was to bear God’s Yehovah’s Son. He informed her that she was to call his name Jesus (most English Bibles say this), but not why that name was to be given. Mary was a virgin betrothed to Joseph and when he found out she was pregnant, and he knew he had nothing to do with it, he planned to divorce her quietly. To quell his fears, the angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and explained the situation, relieving him of his trepidation about taking Mary as his wife. In the dream it was also revealed to him that He was to be called Jesus, but the angel also told him why. Matthew 1:21 (NIV) states:
“She will give birth to a Son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.”
So, the reason for this is, “because He will save His people from their sins.” Honestly, does that make sense? What does the name Jesus have to do with saving his people from their sins? In English, nothing. In Aramaic it makes no sense and neither does it in Greek. But, in Hebrew it makes sense if the proper name is used. Let us de-translate a few words back to Hebrew: “You are to give Him the name Jesus Yeshua, because He will save yoshia His people from their sins.” Yeshua yoshia. It is a Hebrew play on words. Yoshia is from the Hebrew root word Yasha, יָשַׁע (Strong’s 3467) meaning “bring salvation” or “deliverer.” Now we will unpack the name Yeshua and how it ties to this word “yoshia.”
Deuteronomy 32:44 reads in the NIV:
“Moses came with Joshua son of Nun and spoke all the words of this song in the hearing of the people.”
The ESV reads,
“Moses came and recited all the words of this song in the hearing of the people, he and Joshua the son of Nun.”
They both say “Joshua” as do many other English translations. The KJV gets it right:
“And Moses came and spake all the words of this song in the ears of the people, he, and Hoshea the son of Nun.”
Checking Strong’s Concordance, you will find that it is Strong’s H1954 הוֹשֵׁעַ. This is the same Hebrew root word meaning salvation with a “Ho” prefix which means “He”, so the name Hoshea means “He saves/delivers.” We do not typically know him as Hoshea, we know him as Joshua, which helps to explain why some Bible translators changed the name to Joshua but in doing so hid the underlying truth from us. We know that Moses usually referred to him as Joshua, translated into English, but the Hebrew for that is Yehoshua יְהוֹשׁוּעַ, Strong’s 3091. Remembering that Hebrew is all consonants and that the vowels can change, “shea” and “shua” are the same root word only the vowels have changed. Why did “Ho” change to “Yeho?” Moses changed his name to remove the ambiguity of who “He” is. Was the “He” in Hoshea’s name Hoshea himself or was it God Yehovah? Moses eliminated the possibility of thinking it was Hoshea/Joshua that was doing the saving/delivering and put the beginning of Yehovah’s name in place of the pronoun “He.” Yehoshua means “Yehovah saves,” or “Yehovah delivers.”
Now we know that Joshua’s name was originally Hoshea and that it was changed to Yehoshua by Moses in Numbers 13:16 (NIV):
“Moses gave to Hoshea son of Nun the name
JoshuaYehoshua.”
Let us jump forward to the book of Nehemiah written when Judah was coming back into the land after their seventy years in captivity in Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple of Yehovah. In Nehemiah 8:17 (NIV) we see:
“The whole company that had returned from exile built temporary shelters and lived in them. From the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day, the Israelites had not celebrated it like this. And their joy was very great.”
That is an English translation, what is the underlying Hebrew? Checking a Hebrew interlinear, we find that the name in Hebrew is Yeshua יֵשׁ֨וּעַ. By the beginning of the second temple period, the Hebrew letter hey, ה, was removed from the name along with its associated vowel shortening Yehoshua to just Yeshua. Now we know that Joshua = Yehoshua = Yeshua = Yehovah Saves/Delivers.
Notice above in Nehemiah 8:17 that they “built temporary shelters.” After that it says, “Israelites had not celebrated it like this.” What is the “it” here? It is Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. Sukkot means “temporary shelters.”
And you shall call His name Yeshua (Yehovah Saves/Delivers) for yoshia (He will save/deliver) his people from their sins. It only makes sense in Hebrew. So where does the name Jesus come from? It is a transliteration from the Hebrew Yeshua through Greek and then finally into English. Yeshua (יֵשׁ֨וּעַ) becomes Iisous (Ιησούς) becomes Iefus and then becomes Jesus. There is no “sh” in Greek so it is shortened to “s.” An “us” suffix is added to make it masculine in Greek. Later when the hard “J” is added to the English language the initial “I” is changed to “J.” Voilà, Jesus!
Consider that Yeshua is translated as Joshua in the Book of Nehemiah, in the Old Testament/Tanakh. In the New Testament, Yeshua is translated to Jesus. Why did they handle this translation differently? Why is the sixth book of the Bible named Joshua in English instead of Jesus? I like consistency; these translations are anything but consistent!
Have you ever said the word, “Amen?” How about “Hallelujah?” Both are Hebrew words transliterated into English. They are “borrowed words” or “loanwords”, which means they are adopted into the receiving language, in this case English, with as little change as possible from the source, Hebrew. Also notice that Hallelujah is spelled with a “j” but pronounced as “y.” Explained above were the gymnastics necessary to get from the Hebrew Yeshua to the English Jesus, mostly because of the circuitous route taken through Greek. English can borrow the word directly from Hebrew with no change. No need to drop the “sh” since we have that in English. English also has a “Y” so there is no need for the “J.” A masculine “us” suffix? Not a thing in English!
Now that we know, maybe, just maybe, we should do what the Bible says and call Him by the name that the angel delivered from Heaven and call Him Yeshua. After all, believers proclaim that “He will save us from our sins!” Yeshua yoshia.
Hiding the name of the Father behind “The LORD” or “GOD” is a tradition, a manmade rule. The Father said, we could say commanded, that we should call Him by His name. Now that you know, you are without excuse. Recall Yeshua discussing tradition vs. commandments of God in Matthew 15:3:
Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?
Will you continue in the tradition, or will you follow His command? Some people might be offended, but we must educate; this is part of “making disciples.”
I will end this the way that I ended my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…
Yeshua said that we would not see Him again until we say (Matthew 23:39 NIV), “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.” But He did not say, “the LORD.” He spoke His Father’s name, “Yehovah.” Things are going to get bad soon. Tribulation is coming; we might even say that it has already begun. Maybe we should learn this phrase, in Hebrew, so we can be prepared to say it so He can return before no flesh survives what is in our near future (read right to left):
Maranatha!—“Our Lord, come!”
(This article is based on the chapter “Does God Have a Name?” in my book.)
Please consider my book Blessings & Curses: if my people…
This book reveals who we are, where we are, and what we can expect in the near future. Those are big claims. Get your copy today at Amazon and test those claims!
Visit the book’s website here: www.blessingsandcursesbook.com
New here? Consider reading the introduction here.
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