The Legacy Standard Bible's Translation of the Tetragrammaton
If you have participated in a worship service at Grace Community Church any time within the last couple of years, you may have noticed during the reading of Scripture by the senior minister John MacArthur, or by one of the other ministers, that the word "Yahweh" is repeatedly substituted for the word "LORD" in familiar Old Testament passages. So, for example, if Psalm 23 were to be read from the pulpit, you would hear it begin with the words "Yahweh is my shepherd" instead of the familiar words "the LORD is my shepherd." This is because MacArthur and scholars at the seminary connected with his church have modified the New American Standard Bible to create a new Bible translation called the Legacy Standard Bible. The stated objective for the project was to create a translation of the Bible with an unprecedented level of precision. In one video, MacArthur refers to it as the "most accurate" and "most consistent" translation. One of the most notable features of this new translation is the replacement, almost seven thousand times, of the word "LORD" in the Old Testament with the word "Yahweh." Does this translation decision constitute a change for the better?
The four consonants that make up the underlying Hebrew word where this translation change takes place, יהוה, are collectively known as the Tetragrammaton. In God's providence, we don't definitively know how this Hebrew word was originally pronounced, because we don't definitively know what vowels went with the Tetragrammaton. Beginning at some point in the history of the ancient Jews, out of reverence for this name, they would not utter it, but instead would substitute another name for God, often using the Hebrew term for "Lord," when they came across it. This is why the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and virtually all modern translations of the Old Testament translate the Tetragrammaton as "Lord." Some translations capitalize all the letters of the word for "Lord" in order to signify that it is a translation of the Tetragrammaton — e.g., "LORD" in English, "HERRN" in German, and so forth. When vowel markings were added to the Hebrew Text in the early middle ages, the Jewish scribes applied the vowel markings for the Hebrew word for "Lord" to the Tetragrammaton, so that the vowel markings for that word in the Hebrew Bible intentionally do not help us with the correct pronunciation. In light of all this, what are we to make of the decision by MacArthur and his team of scholars to translate the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" in the Legacy Standard Bible?
First, and a very short point, the church should always be suspicious of anyone who comes along after more than 2,000 years of church history with the claim that he sees something important that the church has until that time missed. This is not to say that such a thing is impossible, but it certainly bears scrutiny. Essentially, MacArthur and his team of scholars, by their choice to translate the Tetragrammaton "Yahweh" and not "LORD," are implicitly claiming that Scripture translators, extending back in history even beyond 2,000 years, to the time of the Septuagint translation, got this wrong, impairing to some degree the faithfulness and precision of their translations relative to the original text. To say the least, that's a rather lofty claim. This relatively small group of men, discipled under John MacArthur, and associated with Grace Community Church in Southern California, are setting their understanding of how the Tetragrammaton should be translated over and against a consensus of scholarship which has spanned not decades, or centuries, but millennia.
Second, and perhaps a shorter point, as alluded to above, it is not definitively known how the Tetragrammaton was originally pronounced. Most scholars are in agreement, based on other words in the Old Testament, that the first syllable contained an "a" sound. So the "Yah" portion of "Yahweh" is almost certainly correct. However, the same cannot be said of the remaining vowels, whose identity is not at all clear. Therefore, the translation of the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" rests on unstable ground, if the goal of the translation is to accurately capture the original pronunciation.
Third, and most importantly, this translation decision by MacArthur and his team of scholars seems to represent an (unwitting) attempt to be wiser than the Scriptures. What do I mean by that? Well, the translation of the Tetragrammaton with the equivalent of the word "Lord" in the Septuagint, the Vulgate, Luther's German Bible, the King James Version, and so forth does not settle this question because none of these translations are "inspired" in the sense of being absolutely directed by the Holy Spirit so that they are infallible and contain no error. However, there does exist a translation of the Tetragrammaton that is fully verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit. Which one would that be? The original Greek New Testament. Hopefully MacArthur and the scholars connected with his church would agree that the original Greek New Testament is God-breathed, and therefore infallible and verbally inerrant. In other words, it is an absolute standard to follow in translating the Old Testament Scriptures. In light of this consideration, how does the Greek New Testament translate the Tetragrammaton?
Reading an English translation of the fourth chapter of Luke this morning, I came across the passage where Jesus reads from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me, that I should preach the Gospel to the poor" (Luke 4:18a). These words came directly from Isaiah 61:1, which contains the Tetragrammaton. One can already see that my English Bible translated the Tetragrammaton "Lord," but what about the original Greek New Testament? Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, what Greek word did Luke use to translate the Tetragrammaton? If you guessed Κύριος, which means "Lord" in Greek, you would be correct. And this is not an isolated case, but exactly how the Tetragrammaton is consistently translated throughout the Greek New Testament. The citation of verses one and four of Psalm 110 in the Greek New Testament are another notable example of this.
In short, taking the original Greek New Testament as our fully inspired model for how to translate the Tetragrammaton, we find that the scholarly consensus that has spanned over two millennia is correct. Believers don't need to expend precious time re-memorizing deeply comforting familiar passages of Scripture, such as "The LORD is my Shepherd," using new terminology.
To state the obvious, it's never wise (even inadvertently) to be wise beyond Scripture. The Legacy Standard Bible's repeated translation of the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" represents exactly that. Grace Community Church is a good church, with an overall sound ministry, but the new translation it is using has the potential to undermine that legacy. Hopefully, the error will be acknowledged and corrected by MacArthur and his team of scholars for the good of the church.