Hello everyone.
My given names are Eric Michael. When I first went to Colombia in 1968, I quickly discovered that the Spanish equivalent of Michael is Miguel. Miguel doesn't sound exactly like Michael, but I never had a problem with anyone calling me that — it's the proper rendering of my middle name in Spanish, and I appreciated the effort.
Eric is a different story. Unlike Miguel for Michael, there is no Spanish equivalent for Eric. The female form, Erica, actually works perfectly in Spanish — it conforms naturally to the phonetic rules of the language. But Eric doesn't. Spanish doesn't permit occlusive consonants at the end of words, which means a hard k sound requires a following vowel — something like Erico. But Erico isn't a name. So, when my Colombian friends used my name, it would come out as Erees, or simply Eri. They couldn’t pronounce the final K without a vowel after it.
And you know what? That never bothered me. They dignified me by trying. That, in itself, was a form of respect.
But if they had simply decided to use a title or nickname instead — if they had stopped trying altogether — I would not have been pleased. Who would? We all take a certain pride in our name, whatever it may be, because our name represents us. It's personal. It's ours.
God has a name as well. How does he feel about it? Does he care that we can't pronounce it exactly as Abel did, or Noah, or Abraham? That would be unreasonably demanding, wouldn't it? But does he care if we decide not to use it at all — if we simply replace it with a title or nickname like God, Lord, or the Almighty? That's a different question entirely. Think about it from a human perspective: if everyone around you refused to use your name and addressed you only by a generic title, how would you feel?
And yet that is precisely what most religions have done, hiding behind the excuse that his name is too holy to pronounce. Consider this:
"God also told Moses, 'Say to the Israelites, The LORD, the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob — has sent me to you. This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.'" (Exodus 3:15 BSB)
Does that make any sense at all to you? He’s talking about his name as something he wants to have remembered in generation after generation, but where’s the name?
Now, that was from the Berean Standard Bible. Most translations follow the same pattern, rendering the divine name as LORD in small capitals — a convention that signals, to those who know, that the actual name has been suppressed. The Berean Literal Bible takes a different approach:
"And God said moreover to Moses, 'Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, YHWH, the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob — has sent me to you. This is My name forever, and this is My memorial from generation to generation.'" (Exodus 3:15 BLB)
God wants his name remembered — not just acknowledged, but remembered — from generation to generation. He says:
"I am YHWH — that is My name! And My glory I will not give to another, or My praise to the idols." (Isaiah 42:8 BLB)
Clearly, God takes his name seriously. And he expects us to as well:
"You shall not take the name of YHWH your God in vain, for YHWH will not hold guiltless him who takes His name in vain." (Exodus 20:7 BLB)
This is not a minor matter.
Now, for the purposes of this video I have been using Yehováh as my rendering or pronunciation of the four letters of the Tetragrammaton. Others prefer Yahweh. The goal of this particular video is not to settle the pronunciation question—that is a subject for another time. What we are concerned with here is the sanctification of that name, and the things that can stand in the way of our honoring it.
Which brings me to the subject of semantics.
I was first introduced to that term when I began teaching English as a second language to students in Colombia — back when the earth was cooling, as they say.
When you hear words like rose or pig, do you simply picture a flower and an animal? Or do those words carry emotional overtones—associations, feelings, memories? When a woman tells a man he's a pig, she is not experiencing a neurological condition that prevents her from recognizing objects. She is making a pointed comment about his behavior—his poor hygiene, or his eating habits, or his overall manner—something she finds objectionable. That's semantics. Words carry weight beyond their definitions.
Consider the word father. Was yours loving, present, protective, and kind? Or was he cold and distant, perhaps even cruel? When someone says to you "God is our Father," the meaning they intend may be quite different from what lands in your mind—because you bring your own emotional history to that word. The speaker has no control over that.
The same dynamic applies to the name Jehovah. I have observed that for many people, simply hearing that name produces an immediate negative reaction — a kind of visceral recoil. Why? I believe it is largely a matter of association. The organization of Jehovah's Witnesses has so thoroughly identified itself with that name that for many former members, Jehovah and the organization have become inseparable in their minds. If you were seriously harmed by the conduct or teachings of that organization, it is entirely understandable—psychologically speaking—that the name itself would carry the weight of that trauma. The name became the brand, and the brand became the wound.
The people who exploited God's name in that way will answer for it. The same scripture that warns us not to take his name in vain assures us:
"YHWH will not leave anyone unpunished who takes His name in vain." (Exodus 20:7b BSB)
Now let me show you something interesting.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a service that Google provides to help people like us determine how often any given word has been used in the printed literature of the English language, going back to 1500 CE. Results are presented as a percentage of all the words in all publications released in a given year.
Here I've entered two common English renderings of the name of the God of the Bible: Jehovah and Yahweh.
I've started with the first 300 years, from 1500 to 1800, with the smoothing set to zero. To explain what smoothing does — it allows you to average out frequency across a range of years. Set to zero, it gives you the raw percentage of how often a given word appears across all published English literature in any particular year.
As you can see, the use of Jehovah reached a notable peak in 1638. However, given that relatively few books were published in the 1600s, it wouldn't take much to produce a spike like that in a single year. Let's smooth out the graph to make it easier to read. We'll go with a smoothing factor of 3, which gives us a rolling seven-year average.
That makes the chart a little easier to read, doesn't it?
Notice that Yahweh was virtually nonexistent in published English literature across that entire 300-year span.
Now let's look at the 19th century, from 1800 to 1899.
Keep in mind that the total volume of published literature grew rapidly during this period. A number of independent Bible research groups also broke away from mainstream religion and began publishing their own works. It was from these groups that the Adventist movement emerged — and it was from that movement that Jehovah's Witnesses were born in the 20th century.
Around 1870, the frequency of Yahweh begins to grow, as we can see in this graph — but it remains far below the number of occurrences of Jehovah.
Let's move now to the 20th century, where things begin to change. Around 1959, the two lines cross and Yahweh overtakes Jehovah. Why?
I can't say for certain, but I have a theory. I believe that a growing aversion to the use of Jehovah was developing among English writers worldwide, driven by its association with Jehovah's Witnesses. To use Jehovah in a non-Witness publication would somehow lend tacit credibility to the Watchtower Society. So a different rendering — one carrying no association with that community — grew in popularity by default.
But when we extend the graph into the 21st century, to the most recent year Google currently tracks, we get this.
Why does the use of Jehovah in English literature suddenly spike again around 2013? I believe more people are writing about Jehovah's Witnesses in a negative way, thus boosting the number of occurrences of the divine name. But why those particular years? Remember that in 2010, the Organization resurrected its failed generation doctrine in what has become colloquially known as the Overlapping Generation teaching. In 2014, Governing Body member David Splane expanded on the doctrine using a chart. It was this extraordinary and entirely unscriptural teaching that caused many Jehovah’s Witnesses — including yours truly — to wake up to the fact that we had been misled by the Organization's leadership. What followed was a virtual tidal wave of exposure of Watchtower false doctrine across social media and in print. In my view, that accounts for the sudden surge in occurrences of Jehovah relative to Yahweh during those years.
But here is the real point. Yehovah God places great value on the sanctity of his name and will not deal kindly with those who misuse it, abuse it, or simply suppress it. We should be proud to be associated with his name — not fearful of it, and not disdainful of it.
But does it matter which rendering we use — Jehovah, Yehovah, Yahweh, or any of the others? Are they all equally valid?
That is the subject of our next video.
As always, thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do — and giving a like on this video is always appreciated. And thank you sincerely for your financial support.