Religion: Lord for Jehovah

JHVH, one of the several names of God in the Old Testament, was considered so awful that Jews never pronounced it, and in reading it substituted another name, such as Adonai. There are no vowel characters in Hebrew, and scholars guessed that, with the missing vowels supplied. JHVH should be written “Jehovah,” pronounced “Yah-weh.” This belief was followed in the 1901 American Standard Bible— U. S. edition of the English Revised Version of the King James Bible. Today, scholars have their doubts about the authenticity of the word “Jehovah.” Last week, Yale Divinity School’s Dean Luther Allan Weigle announced that “Lord” would be substituted for “Jehovah” throughout the Standard Bible, added: “Jehovah is not a functioning religious term. People don’t use it; they don’t think of praying to Jehovah.”