In this connection it is well to notice the effort of the King James translators at a fair statement of the divine name.It will be remembered that it appears in the Old Testament ordinarily as "LORD," printed in small capitals.A very interesting bit of verbal history lies back of that word.The word which represents the divine name in Hebrew consists of four consonants, J or Y, H, V, and H.There are no vowels; indeed, there were no vowels in the early Hebrew at all.Those that we now have were added not far from the time of Christ.No one knows the original pronunciation of that sacred name consisting of four letters.At a very early day it had become too sacred to pronounce, so that when men came to it in reading or in speech, they simply used another word which is, translated into English, Lord, a word of high dignity.When the time came that vowels were to be added to the consonants, the vowels of this other word Lord were placed under the consonants of the sacred name, so that in the word Jehovah, where the J H V H occur, there are the consonants of one word whose vowels are unknown and the vowels of another word whose consonants are not used.
Illustrate it by imagining that in American literature the name Lincoln gathered to itself such sacredness that it was never pronounced and only its consonants were ever printed.Suppose that whenever readers came to it they simply said Washington, thinking Lincoln all the while.Then think of the displacement of the vowels of Lincoln by the vowels of Washington.You have a word that looks like Lancilon or Lanicoln; but a reader would never pronounce so strange a word.He would always say Washington, yet he would always think the other meaning.And while he would retain the meaning in some degree, he would soon forget the original word, retaining only his awe of it.Which is just what happened with the divine name.The Hebrews knew it was not Lord, yet they always said Lord when they came to the four letters that stood for the sacred word.The word Jehovah, made up of the consonants of an unknown word and the vowels of a familiar word, is in itself meaningless.Scholarship is not yet sure what was the original meaning of the sacred name with its four consonants.
These translators had to face that problem.It was a peculiar problem at that time.How should they put into English the august name of God when they did not know what the true vowels were? There was dispute among scholars.They did not take sides as our later American Revision has done, some of us think quite unwisely.They chose to retain the Hebrew usage, and print the divine name in unmistakable type so that its personal meaning could not be mistaken.
On the other hand, disputes since their day have shown how they translated when transliteration would have been wiser.Illustrate with one instance.There is a Hebrew word, Sheol, with a Greek word, Hades, which corresponds to it.Usage had adopted the Anglo-Saxon word Hell as the equivalent of both of these words, so they translated Sheol and Hades with the English word Hell.The only question that had been raised was by that Hugh Broughton of whom we were speaking a moment ago, and it had not seemed a serious one.Certainly the three terms have much in common, and there are places where both the original words seemed to be virtually equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon Hell, but they are not the same.The Revised Version of our own time returned to the original, and instead of translating those words whose meaning can be debated, it transliteratedthem and brought the Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek word Hades over into English.That, of course, gave a chance for paragraphers to say that the Revised Version had read Hell out of the Scriptures.All that happened was that cognizance was taken of a dispute which would have guided the King James translators if it had existed in their time, and we should not have become familiar with the Anglo-Saxon word Hell as the translation of those disputed Hebrew and Greek words.
We need not seek more instances.These are enough to illustrate the saying that here is an honest version, the fruit of the best scholarship of the times, without prejudice.
