A pedantic overconcern with the Hebrew Name of God is just another way of undermining the English Bible

An article arguing that "Jehovah" is not the true Name of God has been published at Brannon Howse's Worldview Weekend website, and even with the disclaimer that not all opinions expressed there are shared by the web hosts it seems to me that this is the sort of material that a watchman ministry like Howse's should be watching instead of giving it publicity.

This article about the name "Jehovah" has all the same earmarks as the "scholarship" behind all the new Bibles since Westcott and Hort: an implicit denigration of the work of the King James translators and an appeal to "scholarship" -- in most cases a highly questionable standard of scholarship too -- as of far greater concern than the needs of the Christian who reads the Bible.

There is nothing wrong with "Jehovah." The article denigrates the name as a "nonsense" word but in fact it is simply the original Hebrew four-letter name, or Tetragrammaton ("JHVH"), with vowels added to make it pronounceable, and the argument that the vowels used in the English Bibles were the wrong ones is just pedantic and inconsequential. Nobody KNOWS what the original vowels were and there is a decent argument in favor of those chosen for "Jehovah."

But primarily the problem is that this pursuit of the "authentic" Name of God is a conceit of modern scholarship that feeds all the wrong concerns. The Name "Jesus" is also not "authentic" if what you will only accept as authentic is the original Hebrew Name, Yeshua, nor are any of the English names for the disciples or other famous characters of the Bible. When you translate a term from one language to another it necessarily changes. If you move to a foreign country your own name is likely to be changed for the sake of the native speakers' ears.

And here's an important point: The article notes that the traditional pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton was lost after the Jerusalem temple was destroyed in 70 AD. That fact ought to be a heads-up that God Himself was not concerned to preserve any supposedly "accurate" pronunciation of His Name: it was God Himself who brought about the destruction of the Temple to mark the reign of the Messiah who had come and replaced it.

It might also be noted that God's Name is really a MEANING, not a Hebrew term: It means "I AM that I AM." That can be said in English as well as in Hebrew.

We've had enough of "scholarly" disruptions of our English Bible since Westcott and Hort who were possibly influenced by Jesuits and in any case did their utmost to make the text less accessible to English-speaking people, or as Chris Pinto puts it, unrecognizable. Fiddling around with the Name of God really has no other objective than that. There is no need for all this prissy superstitious "accuracy" and all it does is introduce unnecessary difficulties into learning the Bible which the ordinary reader cannot benefit from. This is just one of the many wearisome ways the legacy of Westcott and Hort has interfered with God's word and the peace of God's people.

It also may be relevant to note that a concern with this sort of "accuracy" underlies the Hebrew Roots heresy.