The story of God's name pt. 3 - How Yahweh and Kyrios were translated into other languages, including English
The story of God's name pt. 3 - How Yahweh and Kyrios were translated into other languages, including English
Happy New Year!
This week, I will continue with part 3 of a 4-part series tracing the story of God’s name from its revelation in Exodus as “Yahweh” to its translation in English Bibles as “the LORD.”
If you need a context re-fresher, here is part 2.
How Yahweh and Kyrios were translated into other languages, including English
The shift from YHWH to Kyrios (‘Lord’) in Christian Scriptures, particularly within the Greek-speaking community, unfortunately led to the eventual disappearance of any distinction between God’s personal name, YHWH, and the title “lord.” The pivotal factor in this event was the translation of the Bible into Latin, which lacks articles. Instead of employing YHWH, Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, decided to use the Latin term for “Lord,” Dominus (Bainbridge 2020). Since Latin lacks articles, the Septuagint’s remarkable differentiation between YHWH and Adonai (‘Lord’) using articles was not possible. Thus the 5,200 occurrences of YHWH were collapsed into the only 700 occurrences of “lord” in the Old Testament.
Thereafter, even translators working with languages that use articles, such as English, followed the Latin approach of using "Lord" in the Old Testament to represent both YHWH and the Hebrew title "Adonai." Regrettably, these translators did not also adopt the Septuagint translators’ method of deliberately omitting "the" when "Lord" referred to Yahweh (Bainbridge 2020). As a result, the distinction between YHWH and the common title for "Lord" was entirely lost.
How Yahweh is translated in most English Bibles today
The distinction between Yahweh and “Lord” remains largely lost to English-speaking audiences to this day. Let us take the Bibles publicly available on Bible Hub as an approximate measure for the access English speakers have to the key distinctions between Yahweh and Lord.
By quickly surveying each of the 27 translations that pop up for the verse in which God expounds upon his name as Yahweh, Exodus 3:15, we can see that 20/27 translations use LORD. These twenty include the most popular translations, such as the KJV, NIV, ESV, KJV, NASB, and NLT. Of these twenty, only 7 offer any footnote for the meaning of Yahweh, and only 3 of the footnotes sufficiently link Yahweh to the verb “to be” and to the rest of the passage. None of them talk about Yahweh as a personal name, nor do they mention how it is deeply connected to God’s covenant with Israel. The prospects of English speakers for understanding the difference between Yahweh and Lord do not look promising.
Six of the remaining 7 versions on Bible Hub translate the Hebrew term for Yahweh as some variation of “Jehovah” or “Yahweh.” If every Bible available to the English speaking world was used equally, this would mean that around ⅓ people would have a better idea of the importance of the name Yahweh in Scripture.
However, Bibles are not used equally. According to a 2014 survey of Bible use in America, of those who reported reading the Bible daily, over 55% read the KJV, followed in second place by 19% reading the NIV (Briggs 2014). Few people still read the ASV, Webster’s Bible, or Young’s Literal translation, three of the versions that distinguish God’s personal name. Furthermore, the other translations in this group, including new hyper-literal translations like the Literal Standard Version, are unlikely to gain a significant readership because their translation is simply so difficult to read (and at times less than grammatical, cf. Ex. 3:13-14).
What We Lose by Translating Yahweh as LORD
By reading translations that render Yahweh as LORD, the average English reader is set up to miss the point of many of the Bible’s most provocative passages. Let us return to the passages I listed in the first email in this series .
| Reference | ESV |
|---|---|
| Exodus 5:1-3 | 1 Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’ ” 2 But Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.” 3 Then they said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” |
| 1 Samuel 17:45 | 45 Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied |
| 1 Kings 18:38-39 | 38 Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. 39 And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The LORD, he is God; the LORD, he is God.” |
In each of these passages, using “the LORD” instead of a personal name like “Yahweh” primes the reader to infer the wrong message. In Exodus 5, Pharoah sounds more like an atheist than what he was: a polytheist who believed his gods were superior to Yahweh, the God of the enslaved Jewish people. The same point applies to 1 Samuel 17:45 and 1 Kings 18:38-39.
In the original language, affirmations like "Yahweh, he is God," in 1 Kings 18:38-39, are powerful declarations of faith and loyalty to the God who rescued Israel from Egypt and forged a covenant with them at Sinai. In contrast, translating the Hebrew word for Yahweh as "the LORD" in this and other passages concerning idolatry leads to a tautology—a redundant statement akin to saying "all pancakes are pancakes" or "all pogo-sticks are pogo-sticks."
“Lord” is also less accurate than it used to be
To complicate matters even further, the title “lord” now appears in English in only two categories: (1) religious literature, predominantly Christian, and, (2) sci-fi, fantasy, and historical fiction dramas (Bainbridge 2020). Modern hearers no longer have access to hearing God’s personal name, as the ancient Israelites did, nor does the term “lord” have the deep political connotations which the first-century church had. Our leaders are “presidents, senators, judges” and so on.
Our English translation of “Kyrios” as “Lord” has often sapped the punch from verses like Philippians 2:11 and Romans 10:9, which tell us that we must state that Christ is “Lord.”
What does it mean to “confess Christ as Lord?”
In the time of the New Testament, it meant to acknowledge that Christ was the one ultimately in charge, not Caesar or any other political or spiritual power. It was as much a declaration of allegiance as it was a statement of faith. By using “Lord,” many translations inadvertently mask the meaning of these powerful verses.
So, how should YHWH and Kyrios be translated?
TL;DR
If the email was too long to read, here are the main points:
- The distinction between God’s personal name (Yahweh) and the title “Lord” was totally lost in the Latin Bible translation, the Vulgate, because Latin does not have articles.
- Later translators used the Vulgate as their base text and so never distinguished between Yahweh and “Lord.”
- The most-read English translations translate Yahweh as “the LORD” (small caps), which makes a small distinction between Yahweh and the title “Lord.”
- The term “Lord” is antiquated, being used now only of feudal rulers or super-villains.
Challenge for You
- Think of how you would translate YHWH and Kyrios.
- This email represents over a dozen hours of work. If you know a friend, pastor, or missionary who would be interested in this information, share it with them!
References
- Bainbridge, John T. 2020. “Translating Κύριος after 600 Years of ‘the Lord’s’ Faithful Service.” The Bible Translator 71 (3): 331–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/2051677020965686.
- Briggs, David. 2014. “The Lord Is Their Shepherd: New Study Reveals Who Reads the Bible – and Why.” Ahead of the Trend, March 7, 2014, sec. Bible. http://blogs.thearda.com/trend/featured/the-lord-is-their-shepherd-new-study-reveals-who-reads-the-bible-%e2%80%93-and-why/.