What Is God’s Name?
(Y H W H)
(Hebrew is written from right to left, and the reader had
to supply the vowels because there were none in the ancient Hebrew
alphabet.)
These four letters (sometimes called the Tetragrammaton, from a Greek word meaning “four-lettered.”) were almost certainly pronounced as Yahweh or Yahvhe, never as Jehovah. This name was always seen as very sacred and powerful and therefore never to be used lightly.
No one ever dared to name a child “God” or “Yahweh”—the
very thought was the height of blasphemy—but throughout biblical
history, godly people gave their children names that reflected God’s
attributes and ownership. For example, Elisha, which contracts two words, El
(meaning God) and yeshua (meaning salvation or deliverance),
means “God is salvation.”
Many times people incorporated God’s proper name,
Yahweh, as part of the name. Elijah is comprised of El (God), with
the first person singular suffix, i (my), and Yahweh (contracted to
Yah): “My God is Yahweh.”
Joshua is formed by contracting Yahweh with yeshua:
“Yahweh is salvation,” an appropriate name for a deliverer, such as
the son of Nun. Before the Babylonian captivity, Joshua’s name in Hebrew
was pronounced Yehoshua (Yeh HO [as in no] shoo ah); afterwards it was
written Yashua (Ya [as in day] SHOO ah). In Greek and Latin it is
(pronounced YA [as in day] soos), written Iesus in Latin.
It is not surprising that Joshua was a popular name for
Hebrew boys (cf. e.g. the high priest of Zechariah 3), nor was it unusual
when the angel instructed Joseph to name his wife’s son Joshua (Matthew
1:21).* In the course of time, English translators rendered it Jesus
in order to distinguish our Lord from his Old Testament kin.
That is why when Jesus said such things as “I have
come in my Father’s name,” (John 5:43) he does not mean that the
Father and he had the same name. Yahweh is God’s proper name. As such,
it is the name of the Father as well as of the Son and also of the Holy
Spirit. Jesus, or Joshua, is the name of the Son of God, once he is
incarnate and becomes a human being; it is not the name of the
pre-existent Son of God, the Second Person in the Godhead. God, the Son,
without ceasing to be God, became a real human being and took the name
Joshua, or Jesus. Jesus Christ is that name coupled with the title of the
Hebrew kings, Messiah, Anointed one, or Christ. In Hebrew it is Yashua
Hamashiach; in Latin and Greek it is Iesus Christus and Iesous
Christos.
Therefore, when our Lord Jesus Christ commanded the
apostles to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he did
not mean that they were to baptize in Jesus’ name in a literal sense,
having to pronounce those words at the time of baptism.
*
“2. Up to the beginning of the 2nd century a.d. the
name Yashua or Iesous was very common among the Jews. Among the 72
translators of the LXX (The LXX is the Greek translation of the Hebrew
Scriptures, called the Septuagint, because there were seventy LXX rabbis
involved. It became the Bible of Hellenistic Judaism, because they no
longer understood Hebrew well. It was done a bit over a century before
Christ.) according to the Epistle of Aristeas (48, 49), three bear
the name of Iesous. Josephus mentions some 20 of the name, including ten
contemporaries of Jesus. The ossuary inscriptions (An ossuary is a
container or receptacle, such as an urn or a vault, for holding the bones
of the dead. The Jews preserved the bones of their ancestors in their
cemeteries and put stone markers above them with inscriptions. In other
words, these are gravestones that have the name Jesus on them, indicating
that various people who had the name Jesus were buried there.) from the
vicinity of Jerusalem (at the beginning of the 2nd cent. a.d.
at the very latest) yield us Yashua . . . Many others bear the name as
well as Jesus. Thus we find a pre-exilic example in the genealogy in Luke
3:29. In Matthew 27:16 Barabbas is also called Iesous Barabbas. In Acts
13:6 the sorcerer in Cyprus is called Bar Iesous, and in Col. 4:11 the
helper of Paul is called Iesous also called Justus.” [Werner Foerster,
“Iesous” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament
(Grand Rapids, 1977), Vol. III, pp. 284, 285 (I have expanded his
abbreviations for clarity and transliterated his Hebrew and Greek into
Roman letters.)