The Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by again yesterday. They were very friendly and polite, and even remembered my name from the last visit. One of the missionaries was new to me, and she assured me that God’s name is Jehovah. She said the Bible proved this. The missionary who’d spoken to me before knew I was a former professor of religion. Nevertheless, they both worked at trying to get me to see the light. I extended to them the courtesy I extend to my students and blog readers, namely, of not revealing my own personal religious convictions. It must be really frustrating to try to convert someone when you don’t know what they already believe!

The point I never have the heart to bring up is God’s name. In fact, no one is certain as to what the divine name is in the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Yahweh” is the closest approximation, based on present conventions of transliterating Hebrew and reconstructing vowels that were never recorded. The word “Jehovah” is historically well understood. It begins with the Jewish reticence to speak God’s name aloud during the second temple period. In order to assure that a reader didn’t accidentally blurt out the divine name when reading Scripture, the Masoretes took the convention of writing the consonants of Yahweh (yhwh – Hebrew has no capital letters) with the vowels for the epithet “lord,” adonai in transliterated Hebrew. The initial J comes from the fact that to get a “y” sound in German a “j” is used. So we get the “J” from yhwh, the “a” from adonai, and alternate from there “h-o-v” (again, because of the Germanic origin of the word, a “v” was used instead of “w”) and finally, “a-h.” All together, this word, which was never used in biblical times, becomes Jehovah, a new name for God.

I admire the conviction of those who stop by a stranger’s house and present their views. When pressed to accept, however, I threw them Lessing’s rings. Gotthold Lessing once suggested that God gave humanity three golden rings: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What God did not give was the answer to which religion was the true one. I placed this conundrum before my earnest guests, but they already had the answer that had flummoxed Lessing. I suggested that if one’s conviction is strong, now borrowing from Kierkegaard, then one must follow that conviction. No, I was told, for the Bible reveals the whole truth. I mentioned that not all religions utilized the Bible in that way. I was told the Bible reveals the whole truth. About that time I had to run off to administer a final exam in a Bible class. The exam covered Ezekiel. And I knew, with a shudder, that Ezekiel had been told to look out from the watchtower!

Ezekiel or Charles Taze Russell's watchtower?