Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Divine Name

Are the Witnesses truly the only ones who respect the name of God? Not quite.​

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for their many practices and beliefs that differ from mainstream Christianity. Examples include their rejection of the Trinity, their door-to-door preaching work, and their strict congregational discipline and shunning rules. But if you asked them, they might tell you that the most obvious marker that sets them apart as the “true” religion is their use of the name “Jehovah” for God.

A little background is in order on this name,which most people have probably heard before but don’t know much about. It’s a fact that in over 6,000 places in the Old Testament, the divine name—also known as the tetragrammaton (meaning “four letters”), which is most closely rendered as YHWH—was replaced with Adonai, or “Lord” in Hebrew. No one knows how that name was pronounced because, out of reverence, it was uttered only by the High Priest once a year, on the Day of Atonement, and that practice ceased with the destruction of the Second Temple. Indeed, by Our Lord’s time, ordinary Jews would’ve never dared to pronounce it themselves, and there are no instances of it within the Greek New Testament (though Jehovah’s Witnesses have taken the liberty of inserting it there when the Old Testament is quoted in their translation).

The Witnesses, meanwhile, noticed that the tetragrammaton had in fact been translated and left present in a few places in the King James version (e.g., at Ps. 83:18). “Jehovah” is how it was rendered, a version of the name that can be traced to the Middle Ages but that scholars have pretty definitively ruled out.

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