In
a recent article on LDS Living, we read the following:
Adoni
This word means
literally “My Lords.” It is the plural form of adon or Lord. It is one of the
principal Hebrew synonyms for Jehovah, used in the Hebrew Bible more than 430
times to refer to the Divine Being of the Old Testament, He who would later be
born into mortality as Jesus Christ.
This is simply wrong.
Firstly, adoni (אדֹנִי) is adon (the Hebrew for “lord”) coupled with “my” (i). It is not plural. It simply means, translated rather directly “lord-my.”
Secondly,
Psa 110:1, which the New Testament interprets the second lord therein as Jesus (e.g.,
Heb 1:13; 1 Cor 15:22-28; Mark 12:28f) uses adoni
but the first Lord is יְהוָה Yahweh (alt. אֲדֹנָי Adonai). There is a difference between
these two terms, as I discussed at Psalm 110:1 and the two Lords in the 1832 First Vision Account; cf. the discussion of Psa 110:1, Deut 6:4, and Mark 12:28f at Refuting Jeff Durbin on "Mormonism".
Jeffrey R. Holland, whose book this article is based on, himself admits that Yahweh/Jehovah is sometimes applied to the Father, not the Son exclusively, so this should not be problematic to LDS readers.
The problem is that adoni is not used as a divine title in the Hebrew Bible, but adonai is. The latter is a term that appears in the Old Testament for Yahweh (and often, when one encountered YHWH, it was substituted with adonai by the reader to avoid speaking the divine name). Adoni is used for angels, elevated human beings, and even used in the sense of "sir."
That the ancient interpreters of the text of Psa 110:1 (LXX: 109:1) did not understand Adonai to be the correct vocalisation of the Hebrew can be seen in how various elevated human figures were interpreted to be the second lord, such as Abraham. For a full discussion, see David M. Hay, Glory at the Right Hand: Psalm 110 in Early Christianity (SBL, 1973) which covers the evidence from the Targums and other sources.
