The very affable Karaite Jewish researcher Nehemia Gordon, who collaborates closely with Messianic minister Michael Rood, has tracked down 1,000 Hebrew Bible manuscripts with, he says, the true Name of Elohim (God) spelled out, not only as the well-known consonants or Tetragrammaton (YHWH) but containing the vowel-pointing also that he claims demonstrates conclusively that the name of our Heavenly Father is YEHOVAH (see diagram above showing examples). But are they what he claims? Do they reveal the True, Divine Name of Elohim (God)?

If you are a Catholic or Protestant, the name 'Jehovah' will be familiar to you as it is found in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, peculilarly, in four places (Ex.6:3; Ps.83:18; Is.12:2; 26:4). Why is that peculiar? What's peculiar is that of the hundreds, if not thousands, of places where the Divine Name YHWH could and (arguably) should have been translated as 'Jehovah' (or whatever the correct name is), it wasn't. Why those four passages in particular?

The New King James Version (NKJV) dropped all four and stuck with "the LORD" whereas the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901 went in the other direction and translated all references to 'YHWH' as 'Jehovah'. In that respect the translators shared the same opinion as the Jehovah's Witnesses who in both editions of their New World Translation (NWT) have stuck with 'Jehovah'...as you might expect given their name. Now some messianics are following suit replacing the letter 'J' (which is not to be found in Hebrew) with 'Y' and calling YHWH 'Yehovah' or 'Yahovah' or 'Yehowah' or 'Yahowah' ... or a similar sounding word.

Nehemia Gordon's painstaking work over 17 or so years definitely confirms that in the manuscripts (MSS) which he cites the Tetragrammaton is pointed to read something like 'Yehovah'. He could barely contain his excitement when he revealed his discovery to the public on Michael Rood's show, and though Rood was more subdued, he was evidenty convinced. It was, Rood claimed, the final piece of evidence he needed to complete his life's work. Their YouTube videos are spreading like wildfire amongst messianics who are concluding, in large numbers, that the true Name of our Heavenly Father is YEHOVAH.

I contend that the Divine Name is not 'Yehovah' or 'Yahovah' but YAHWEH and I'll tell you why I do not believe Gordon's work, though very interesting and useful from an historian's perspective, is theologically in error and does not tell us what the Divine Name is. A thousand oldish MSS no more proves that 'Yehovah' is Elohim's (God's) Name than hundreds of thousands of copies of certain Bible translations in English that use 'Jehovah' proves that the Divine Name is 'Jehovah'.

I have written many articles on the subject of God's Name before and you can read these on our Yahweh, the True Name of God website. I particularly recommend you first carefully study one of the articles therein, The Divine Name YHWH: How is It Properly Pronounced? and a very important book by R.Clover which may be found online free, called The Sacred Name YHWH: A Scriptural Study, which I recommend you download and study carefully. You should cover at the very least the material in my own article before proceeding with this short study.

Let us now find out why all the excitement generated by Nehemia Gordon's discovery is unwise and why the dogmatic theology coming out of it is improperly considered and potentially harmful to the Body of Messiah.

Gordon is challenging the claim made by scholars that superstitious Jews, afraid to pronounce the True Name, decided to insert the vowels of the Hebrew word for 'Lord', Adonai, into the Tetragrammaton so that whenever someone reading from the Torah, pointed or unpointed (with or without the artificially added vowels) would think 'Adonai' and repeat it rather than the well-known but suppressed True Name of 'Yahweh'. Gordon claims, and uses his 1,000 MSS as proof, that no such device was ever employed, that the pointing or vowels were always the 'real thing' and that the Divine Name was supposed to be pronounced 'Yehovah'.

Now you must remember that Gordon is a Karaite, not a Rabbinical Jew, so he rejects (as do we and most Messianics) the so-called 'oral Law' or 'oral Torah'. He, like us, maintains that whilst the Divine Name should be held in the greatest of respect and with reverance and never used lightly, the many mitzvot (commandments) tell us to use the Name in our worship and prayers which contradicts the claim of the rabbis that the Name (which they reverentially translate as 'haShem' - literally, 'the Name' or render as 'Adonai') should never be articulated (and never was) except at Yom Kippur. Indeed, we are commanded to call upon the Name of YHWH to be saved many times in the Davar (Word).

There is a problem with this word 'Yehovah' or its anglicised form 'Jehovah' which I have pointed out many, many times throughout my 30-plus years of ministry, something I have been telling Jehovah's Witnesses for as long as I can remember: the Hebrew word 'hovah' means PERVERSE or CORRUPT. Coupling it to the shortened form of the divine Name, 'YAH', therefore constitutes an act of the utmost irreverence and indeed blasphemy. Such a combination, spoken when fully conscious of its true meaning, deliberately and unapologetically, could only be done by the Devil himself and his fallen malakim (angels), the demons. I do not say that those who write or articulate the name 'Jehovah', 'Yehovah' who do so ignorantly are condemned, for Elohim (God) judges no one who sins in ignorance but to know what the word means and to continue to use it in full cogniscence of it, is surely to invite condemnation.

The more important question that needs to be asked, then, is when did this blasphemous word start to be used and incorporated into the Tanakh (Old Testament)? The story is a little convoluted so any study must unpack the facts carefully, which we won't have time to fully do here today. And to begin with, it must be said - and this is what I maintain - that before the Babylonian exile of Judah, the name 'Yehovah' ('Jehovah') was unknown to Israel. Before then, the Creator was always called 'Yahweh'. Indeed - and this must be stressed - before then, the Tanakh (Old Testament) included no vowels whatsoever and the oldest surviving Tanakh (Old Testament), the Dead Sea Scrolls collection of Qumran, follows in this ancient tradition. The rabinically-corrupted Masoretes, who in more modern times pointed the Tanakh (Old Testament) version most commonly used in English Bible translations, corrupted the text substantially. Even the Jehovah's Witnesses will privately, if pressed, agree that the Divine Name should be pronounced 'Yahweh' and that the only reason they use 'Jehovah' is because it is the commonly used anglicised form.

But here are the facts that Gordon himself admits in his broadcasts. The earliest MS containing the 'Yehovah' vowel-pointing goes no further back than 895 AD, from about the time MSS with pointing was created! That's less than 1,200 years ago and the Dead Sea Scrolls are nearly a thousand years older. Not only are these MSS post-Babylonian captivity but, even more importantly, they are so by 800 years - they are post first century Messianic/Christian when Messianism and Judaism had long made a complete split. And the word 'Jehovah' did not appear in English translations of the Bible until the Protestant Reformation where it appears in the four KJV locations previously mentioned, including in my earlier Coverdale edition. The first English Bible used 'Iehovah' in the 1530 English Bible before the letter 'J' was in use in our language. Go to the Latin Vulgate, which prevailed in the Catholic world for over a thousand years before the Reformation, and you will find 'YHWH' translated in one of those four key passages as the Hebrew 'Adonai':

"Ego Dominus qui aparaui Abraham, Isaac, et Jacob in Deo omnipotente, et nomen meum ADONAI non indicavi eis" (Exous 6:3, Vulg.)

In the other three passages the Hebrew is rendered, "Domino Deo" ('Lord God' = 'Yahweh-Elohim'). There is no use of the word 'Jehovah' or cognates in the Latin Vulgate whatsoever, a rather odd omission had 'Yehovah' been used by the Jews of the time. Instead they more predictably use 'Adonai' in a key passage (Ex.6:3) as the Jews have done for at least two millennia!

Where did the first English Protestants get their four 'Jehovah's' from? From four of the references in the Masoretic Tiberian pointing system (why they chose only those four is anyone's guess). The Masoretes in any case used the block script which they borrowed from Persian-controlled Assyria around the 6th-7th century BC. It was not the writing script used by Moses, which was hieroglyphic, so the Torah was not originally authored in it. And remember, the Jews were taken into Exile in Babylon in the 6th century BC (BCE).

The Masoretes, who were Messiah-rejecting, post-crucifixion Jews, did most of their MS work between 600 and 950 AD. So the MSS that Gordon cites are all from the later Masoretic period, most of which are likely multiple copies of copies, and we don't know anything about the very earliest one and how it came into existence or why they pointed YHWH the way they did. And remember, the Masoretic text is not so much Tanakh or Old Testament as a running commentary which was incorporated into the text itself. The pointing of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, was a commentary on what the Masoretes believed the Name should be pronounced as (Adonai), just as we find different messianic Bible translations that use the various names used by different messianic groups. Given the Masoretes corrupted so much else in the Tanakh (Old Testament) in order to make prophecies about Yah'shua (Jesus) less discernable in order to keep Jews in Judaism, we should not be surprised to find them doing the same thing based on either the superstitions or lies learned by the Jewish rabbis in exile in pagan Babylon where the occult made major inroads. After all, they changed the entire Divine Calendar while they were there!

Far from establishing that the 9th century Jews knew the 'True Name' but the Catholics didn't, it simply means that pointed Tanakh's (Old Testaments) didn't exist when Jerome made his translation into the language of the Romans in the 4th century and which became standard Christian fare for so long. Jerome revised the older Vetus Latina of the Old Latin Gospels that were in use in 382 AD when he was commissioned by Pope Damasus I. What the Latin Vulgate translation of Exodus 6:3 does establish is that the Jews of his day referred to YHWH as 'Adonai' or 'LORD' which is still why nearly all Catholic and Protestant Bibles still do the same out of deference to Jewish rabbinical tradition and claimed authority. Only very few Western Bibles do not use 'LORD' like, as we have seen, the American Standard Version (ASV) and the first 1966 edition of the Catholic Jerusalem Bible (which I have two copies of) which used 'YAHWEH until the Jews protested so vehemently that the Vatican ordered its removal and reversion to 'LORD' in the second edition.

All Nehemia Gordon has established is that 1,000 post-7th century Tanakh (Old Testament) MSS pointed the Tetragrammaton with the vowels that, if you read it out, spell out the blasphemous word 'Yehovah', accusing the Creator of being a pervert, in accordance with what the Talmudic rabbis were teaching at that time or maybe earlier in Exile. He does not establish that this is, or ever was, the True Name of the Father. At best we can only speculate as to how this state of affairs came into being. We don't even know that anybody ever read this name out from these later Christian era MSS. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that the True Name was never read out loud by this time on account of Hebrew superstition imitated by the Catholic Church.

For the sake of argument, I am going to give the Masoretic scribes the benefit of the doubt (though the opposite might be true, of course - they may have been crooks) and suggest what I consider to be a reasonable theory to explain what's going on ín these MSS. It's the consensus of nearly all serious scholarship on the subject and I see no reason to challenge it. The contention is that the pointing was added by the Masoretes to YHWH not so that the Divine Name could be pronounced correctly (which they would not have dared to do, based on the superstition and rabbinical ruling of the time period) but simply to remind the reader to substitute in the word 'Adonai' when reading out 'YHWH'. This scribal convention is known as Kethiv-Qere, which literally means, 'what is literally written' and 'what is to be literally read'.

There are many of these Kethev-Qere's in the Tanakh (Old Testament) where a scribe would come across a particular word and, in the margin of the scroll, take the consonants of that word and insert a different set of vowels to the ones contained in the actual text because that was the 'religiously-correct' convention of the day. You may find that shocking - and I agree, it was - but that is what these people did and we have to deal with it when it comes to interpreting the Bible properly. The result is a hybrid word, however 'impossible' a word it actually was which was never used in real life or conversation.

Another piece of information we know from considerable research is that this substitution was not always done correctly by the scribes. Sometimes they made mistakes, as often as one out of every five occasions when the word 'YHWH' appeared in the text. So other hybrid variants you will find include 'Yehwah', 'Yehowih', 'Yehuwih', and 'Yehwih'. Let's ignore those and do the basic exercise of combining the consonants of YHWH with the vowels (the points above and below the consonants of Adonai) to make the new word 'Yehovah' or 'Yahovah':

But, 'oh', people like Gordon and others point out, 'there's a 'vowel missing' in the hybrid word as indicated by the little green arrow above. So, they argue, this can't be a hybrid word but must, in fact, be the true pronunciation of the Divine Name. If it had been a hybrid, the missing 'vowel' should be there.'

'Not so fast! The 'vowel', which looks like a short horizontal line next to the colon-like shewa, is missing.' The reason that is missing is because that it how you correctly place a shewa or 'half-vowel' underneath a yod, the first letter here of the Tetragrammaton. Alef, which is the first letter of the word Adonai, is a gutteral letter, which must, to be grammatically correct, be pointed in this way. So 'Yahovah ' would indeed be the correct grammatical result of the hybrid word. This is not evidence that 'Yehovah' is not a hybrid word! This therefore is not proof that the Divine Name is 'Yahovah' (or 'Yehovah', 'Jehovah') and not Yahweh.

I repeat, the Masoretic scribes added this vocalisation not to teach the Scripture reader how to pronounce the Divine Name because the rabbis didn't want the Divine Name pronounced in their vocalised version of the Tanakh (Old Testament) prepared for them by the Masoretes. The sole purpose of these vowels was to signal to the reader that when they came across the Divine Name they were to say, "Adonai" because that was the source or origin of the vowels. Should the rabbis have done this? No. They mutilated the text, but they did it nonetheless and we need to know about it.

We know this is the correct explanation for a second reason too. The first syllable of the True Name is not 'Yeh' as in 'Yehovah' (or 'Yehweh' as one messianic cult calls it). Let's take a look at another passage of Scripture, this time from the New International Version (NIV) which is pretty representative of other Protestant Bibles, to see why:

"The LORD (YH) is my strength and my song;
He has become my salvation.
He is my God (Elohim), and I will praise Him, my father's God (Elohim),
and I will exalt Him" (Ex.15:2, NIV).

Here the Divine Name is not YHWH (Yahweh) but the abbreviated form, YH (Yah). Notice (see below) that the hé has a point in the middle of it (above the green arrow) to indicate that the letter is a consonant and not serving as part of a vowel:

We don't have time to go into the scholarship concerning the second syllable of YHWH, namely, 'weh', of which there is a considerable body, not least the fact that the Divine Name was regularly translated into Greek in the first two centuries so we know exactly how it was pronounced by the first believers. And it was never 'Yahovah' or 'Jehovah'. You will find all this information supplied in Clover's book cited earlier.

All of this should serve as yet another warning not to follow the pop theologians and amateur scholars. Yes, scholars do get things wrong sometimes but not in this matter. The Name of our Heavenly Father, beyond controversy, is YAHWEH, and so shall it always remain both in this ministry and in the Remnant.

Recommended Reading

[1] The Yehovah Deception: Reinventing a Misnomer