Is Jehovah God's True Name?

The Origin of the Name Jehovah in Popular Culture

In the film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the titled hero must make it past three riddles in order to claim the treasure of the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. In the second of those riddles, Indiana must correctly spell God's true name by stepping on tiles for each letter.

One wrong step and he'll fall to his doom. He says that God's true name is Jehovah. Now in the movie, the cave temple holding the grail had been around for almost a thousand years, but according to history, the name Jehovah has been around only about half that time.

Jehovah, Yahweh, and the History of the Divine Name

Jehovah is the Germanic spelling of Yahweh, known as the Tetragrammaton or the Hebrew name for God, represented by the letters YHWH with no vowels. In the year 1520, a monk by the name of Peter Galatinus took the vowels from the word Adonai, another name for God, and he put them in between the consonants for Yahweh.

The German J is a lot like the English Y and the W is more like a V sound, so what resulted was the name Jehovah. William Tyndale made it famous when he printed the name in his translation of the Bible, and it was later used in the King James Bible as well.

Why Jehovah Is Not God's True Name

Now there's nothing wrong with calling God Jehovah, but knowing the origin of the name means we can be skeptical of anyone claiming it's God's true name. The Jehovah's Witnesses attribute the name to God, the Mormons say it's Jesus' real name according to their prophet Joseph Smith, and some apostolics and charismatics will claim to have been called on by Jehovah.

Knowing Christ Is Greater Than Pronouncing the Divine Name

What's more important than knowing how to correctly pronounce the name of God is to know His Son, Jesus Christ. Only through Jesus do we have access to the Father and right standing with God. His is the name above every name when we understand the text.