Yahweh's Witnesses?

[historia]

Picking up a topic from an earlier thread: According to scholars, the ancient Hebrew word for God, YHWH, was most likely vocalized as "Yahweh," while the term "Jehovah" is a late-Medieval rendering that transposes the vowels for Adonai into YHWH.

Question for debate: Should Jehovah's Witnesses stop using the term "Jehovah" and instead use the term "Yahweh?"

[JehovahsWitness]

My primary evidence for which form people are most familiar with is 40 years of speaking with ordinary people on the street and calling on them at their homes

Do you have survey data to support that anecdote?

Why do you ask? are you suggesting I need a "survey data" before I accept my own life experience ?

I see "Yahweh" used all the time by Christian speakers and in popular Christian publications

Did I say I was refering to "Christian speakers and [the writers of ] popular Christian publications"?

My primary evidence for which form people are most familiar with is 40 years of speaking with ordinary people on the street and calling on them at their homes along with our collective experience as such of BILLIONS of hours of interacting with people on this topic. Not in academia, not on the selective hothouse religious forums and certainly not in the corridors of institutes of higher theological "learning" ...

NOTE regarding "popular Christian publications" Jehovahs Witnesses produce most widely circulated magazine In the world and our website is the most visited religious website on earth.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-mos ... %20million.

[2timothy316]

[Replying to historia in post #17]
Let me Google that for you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is ... nt=gws-wiz

[historia]

My primary evidence for which form people are most familiar with is 40 years of speaking with ordinary people on the street and calling on them at their homes

Do you have survey data to support that anecdote?

Why do you ask?

So the rest of us have some objective data to look at.

I see "Yahweh" used all the time by Christian speakers and in popular Christian publications

Did I say I was refering to "Christian speakers and [the writers of ] popular Christian publications"?

Huh? This is an observation I'm making, not something you said.

It was partially in response to your suggestion that ordinary people aren't as familiar with "Yahweh" because it is only being advocated for by people on the Internet.

[historia]

Use of the name Jehovah in English is far more common and recognized than Yahweh.

Please provide evidence to support this claim.

Let me Google that for you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is ... nt=gws-wiz

As far as I can tell, none of the websites in those Google results provide data indicating which form of the divine name is more common and recognized in English today. I'm afraid this didn't support your assertion.

[JehovahsWitness]

My primary evidence for which form people are most familiar with is 40 years of speaking with ordinary people on the street and calling on them at their homes

Do you have survey data to support that anecdote?

Why do you ask?

So the rest of us have some objective data to look at.

You asked for evidenced upon which *I* base MY conclusion, if you wanted objective data for yourself and OTHERS may I suggest you go out on the street, start talking to people, ask if they know who Yahweh is and keep it up for 40 years like I have. Its very difficjlt to know what the man on the street knows without getting your hands dirty and leaving the cloistered halls of academia.

Picture of Jesus reading a survey data so he could find out what ordinary people think

Did Jesu learn what the washer women, the farmers and the prostitutes and manual workers knew from ..*cough* .. survey data? Oh I forgot, academia has found a better way .... SMH

[2timothy316]

Use of the name Jehovah in English is far more common and recognized than Yahweh.

Please provide evidence to support this claim.

Let me Google that for you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is ... nt=gws-wiz

As far as I can tell, none of the websites in those Google results provide data indicating which form of the divine name is more common and recognized in English today. I'm afraid this didn't support your assertion.

Its not the websites it found it was the search I used.
what is the most recognized name for God
#1 result Jehovah.

So it DOES support my assertion. Do you know the difference between transliteration and translation? Yahweh and Jehovah, do you know which is a transliteration and which is a translation? If you do, then you'd know why books are translated and not transliterated.

[JehovahsWitness]

Use of the name Jehovah in English is far more common and recognized than Yahweh.

Please provide evidence to support this claim.

Let me Google that for you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is ... nt=gws-wiz

As far as I can tell, none of the websites in those Google results provide data indicating which form of the divine name is more common and recognized in English today. I'm afraid this didn't support your assertion.

Its not the websites it found it was the search I used.
what is the most recognized name for God
#1 result Jehovah.

Another thing to consider, as I mentioned earlier, is many of the protestant missionary bibles rendered the Divine name as Jehovah, so many African and Asian countries historically are very familiar with this form. My during my time in Africa I never once heard anyone refer to God as Yahweh. ...


NOT Jehovahs Witnesses here ...

[historia]

My primary evidence for which form people are most familiar with is 40 years of speaking with ordinary people on the street and calling on them at their homes

Do you have survey data to support that anecdote?

Why do you ask?

So the rest of us have some objective data to look at.

You asked for evidenced upon which *I* base MY conclusion

Yes, to see if you have any objective data to support your conclusion. If you don't, no worries.

if you wanted objective data for yourself and OTHERS may I suggest you go out on the street, start talking to people, ask if they know who Yahweh is and keep it up for 40 years like I have.

That still wouldn't answer the question, as the people I would talk to would represent a non-random, self-selective sample, and so would not be reflective of the population as a whole.

Did Jesu learn what the washer women, the farmers and the prostitutes and manual workers knew from ..*cough* .. survey data? Oh I forgot, academia has found a better way .... SMH

I would expect a better argument than this from you, my friend.

[historia]

As far as I can tell, none of the websites in those Google results provide data indicating which form of the divine name is more common and recognized in English today. I'm afraid this didn't support your assertion.

Its not the websites it found it was the search I used.
what is the most recognized name for God
#1 result Jehovah.

So it DOES support my assertion.

Yeah, that's simply not how Google works.

If I do a search for "which name are people more familiar with Jehovah or Yahweh" the top search result is for Yahweh. If I just do a search for "name of God" the top result is also for Yahweh.

Does that mean that Yahweh is the name people are more familiar with? No, because Google isn't some kind of "oracle" answering our questions. It's a search engine that simply returns web pages that contain the words you searched for, and sorts them according to a relevancy ranking algorithm that takes into account term frequency, inverse document frequency, and linking. That's it.

Now, if you want to look at how frequently authors are using the terms "Yahweh" and "Jehovah" in books, Google can give us that information. And that is, I think quite telling, albeit only an indirect indicator of its usage among the general population.

Do you know the difference between transliteration and translation?

Yes.

Yahweh and Jehovah, do you know which is a transliteration and which is a translation?

They are both transliterations. The Awake! article from 1973 that you are likely basing this argument on -- I came across it earlier when searching -- is simply mistaken on this point.

If you do, then you'd know why books are translated and not transliterated.

The Bible contains both translation and transliteration. Importantly for our purposes, names are usually transliterated. You would know that already from a Google search for "transliteration."

[JehovahsWitness]

Did Jesus learn what the washer women, the farmers and the prostitutes and manual workers knew from ..*cough* .. survey data? Oh I forgot, academia has found a better way .... SMH

I would expect a better argument than this from you, my friend.

My point is that the Christian mission is not to produce academic studies (which more often than not blow hither and wither with whatever is fashionable) and if you (general "you" as in, "one") if a person needs a paper to judge the reality that is just outside their door, they need to get out more.

Jehovahs Witnesses are not adverse to studying the language and customs of those we preach to, but from there to take a stance that unless mainstream Christian organisations or academic institutions reach a consensus on what is popular, it it cannot be popular, is riduculous.

Anyway, as someone has already stated, this is really a non-issue... we have no objection to the form "Yahweh" and since nobody to my knowledge has adopted the name "Yahweh's Witnesses" nobody else feels strongly about it either. I feel confident your point is not that it is wrong or morally objectionable for us to be called Jehovah's Witnesses, and over and above the perennial suggestion that there are other forms closer to the original, I find it hard to see what your point actually is.


JW





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