"You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods. (Exodus 20:4-5a NLT)
The word “Elohim” (God) is enough to make us pause and consider the incomparable magnitude of what can be learned about our God. (Remember, the word for our one God is written in the plural.) The problem, though, is that the same word is used to talk about many, false gods that were vying for the attention of our Israelite nation. No, they would need to have a way to identify their one, majestic God rather than those other puny false ones. God gave them just such an identity. God told them The Name.
Now tell them this: 'As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I will do to you the very things I heard you say. You will all drop dead in this wilderness! Because you complained against Me, every one of you who is twenty years old or older and was included in the registration will die. You will not enter and occupy the land I swore to give you. The only exceptions will be Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. (Numbers 14:28-30 NLT)
Whenever you come across the word LORD in your Old Testament Scriptures, the Hebrew word behind that English translation is always the same. In order to understand the word, we need to review just a little bit of Hebrew.
When Hebrew was originally written down, they did not write down any vowel sounds. They only had letters for the consonants. When a rabbi or preacher would read the Scriptures, he would fill in the vowel sounds from the memory of listening to others read the same Scriptures. The consonants were the written cues. The full word was passed down verbally.
Over time, they began making little markings on the page to remind themselves how to pronounce the word. In other words, these little marks indicated the vowels. These little marks are called diacritic marks. These diacritic marks were included in the text for every word except one: The Name of God. That’s because they had such high respect for God’s name that they didn’t even want to pronounce it wrong.
"You must not misuse the name of the LORD your God. The LORD will not let you go unpunished if you misuse His name. (Exodus 20:7 NLT)
As a result, they didn’t pronounce it at all. When they came to the word, they would simply say “The Name.” All that was passed down on paper, then, were the consonants: YHWH. Sometimes, people will fill in the vowels for this word to pronounce it, “Yahweh.” Others will fill in different vowels to pronounce it, “Jehovah.” They are all the same Hebrew word.
How about you? Do you respect God, and God’s Name? Do you respect God so much that you are careful to even pronounce it correctly? How do you show respect for God?
No comments:
Post a Comment