Writing the name of God in Greek, by Dirk Jongkind

David calls out in Psalm 103, ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!’ (Psalm 103:1)

Believers have always had a special reverence for the name of God, both for his ‘name’ in the sense of reputation, but also for the name by which he revealed himself. In Jewish tradition, the name of God, which in Hebrew is יהוה (YHWH), is never pronounced. This is also why the term ‘Tetragrammaton’ (meaning ‘four letters’) is used to refer to the name יהוה. With some exceptions¹, this has been carried over into modern translations by rendering YHWH as Lord in small capitals.

In English translations, the small capitals distinguish ‘Lord’ from the title ‘lord’ or ‘master’—אָדוֹן (adon or adonai). Sometimes we find both the title ‘Lord’ and the Tetragrammaton used together. In Genesis 15:2, for example, we find Abram asking, ‘O Lord God (אֲֲדֹנָי‭ ‬יֱהוִה, adonai YHWH), what will you give me?’ The problem with using ‘Lord’ as a (correct) translation of adonai and also to represent the Tetragrammaton becomes immediately clear. For the sake of consistency, Genesis 15:2 should be ‘Lord Lord’, but here and elsewhere our translations use the more elegant, ‘Lord God’, now rendering YHWH as ‘God’ in small capital letters.

Historically, the name of God has been treated with respect. The story of how this respect played out in the early Greek manuscripts of the Bible tells us a similar, but complicated story. Perhaps surprisingly, the results of this story are to be seen in many of our churches even today.

The Greek translation of the Old Testament

The Hebrew Bible, which Christians know as the Old Testament, was translated into Greek in the centuries before the birth of Christ. We only have sporadic manuscript evidence from this time, but it seems that there is a pattern to be found: whenever the Tetragrammaton is found in the Hebrew text, the oldest Greek manuscripts do something special. Instead of attempting a translation or using some sort of Greek version of the Hebrew letters, these manuscripts have the divine name written in Hebrew characters. A reader of such a manuscript would read the normal Greek translation and then suddenly come across a break in the Greek text, encounter four Hebrew letters, and then resume the normal Greek text.

Often we find the Tetragrammaton written in the familiar square script יהוה, but occasionally we also find the name written in the old Hebrew script.

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