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"Jehovah"

Forgive a language purist, but "Jehovah" was never a name, or the name, for God in the orginal texts of the old testament.

"Jehovah" was an invented word, invented from a mistake.

The four most frequently used words for God in the original old testament texts were El or Elohim, YHVH and Adonai (Lord). Jehova is not found in any of the original Hebrew texts.

But, as the centuries passed, leading towards the end of the old testament era and the production of numerous scroll and parchment versions of the old testment, the daily-spoken language of many Jews, even learned Jews, began to change. The Jews of later history, spread throughout the middle east, began to speak Aramaic, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian and Greek in preference to Hebrew, depending on the dominant languages of the empires that they lived under.

Ancient Hebrew was written solely with marks for consonents (YHVH) and the proper vowell sound was inferred by context.

But, as time went on and other spoken languages came into use among the Jews, a danger arose that the proper pronunciation of the Biblical language would be forgotten.

Hebrew scholars began to add little diacrtical marks under the Hebrew consonants, indicating the proper vowell sounds that belonged to each word.

For YHVH (Yahweh) though, they did not produce the proper diacritical marks, since the name (YHVH) was not supposed to be pronounced anyway.

In the attempt to produce a complete set of the old testament translated into Greek, the scholars made the first single compilation of all the old testament texts together in one set. When they did, due mostly to their unfamiliarity of ancient spoken Hebrew, they gave the consonents for YHVH the diacritical marks for the vowell sounds for Adonai (as no vowell marks had been written for YHVH).

As the letter Y in Hebrew becomes a J in Greek and Latin and the vowell sounds for Adonai were given as a soft "a" or "e", "o", and "a", the invented word became J, E, H, O, V, A, H - Jehovah.

Yet, in reality no such word had ever been spoken or written by those who were inspired by God to write the original old testament texts.

If we were to at least maintain some degree of authenticity to the original texts, we would use Yahweh and not Jehovah.

Similarly, if we were wanting to be "authentic" to the language of the original Christian disciples and the Lord God they knew in person, we would say Yeshua and not the Greco-Roman Jesus; a name by which He was never known by His contemporaries.