Friday, August 25, 2023

Jeffrey R. Chadwick on the use of "Jehovah" in the Book of Abraham

  

Use of the Name Jehovah

 

When Abraham was about to be sacrificed, he called upon the Lord to rescue him. The Lord effected the patriarch’s escape from the sacrificial knife and then told him, “My name is Jehovah” (Abraham 1:16). This event needs to be investigated because many non-LDS historians and theologians ascribe to the view that Abraham did not know the Lord by this name and that the proper name Jehovah was not revealed or known until the time of Moses (see Exodus 6:3). This position might be refuted scripturally (see Genesis 13:4; 22:14) but until recently could not be refuted in light of known history.

 

Jehovah is generally accepted as an anglicized version of the Hebrew deity-name YHVH, perhaps pronounced “Yahveh.” The name also appears biblically as Ja or Ya, both alone and in compound words such as hallelujah (Praise Ya). This Ya form of the name Jehovah was found in 1975, in the archives of the ancient city of Ebla. The Reverend Mitchell Dahood, Dean of the Oriental Faculty of the Pontifical Biblical Institute and one of the foremost experts on Ebla, reported: “In early passages of the Old Testament, God is referred to as El. Then Exodus 3:14 records that he revealed His true name, Yahweh—which has come into English as Jehovah—to Moses. But the Ebla tablets show that a thousand years before that . . . both Il and Ya, forms equivalent to El and Yahweh, existed in Northwest Semitic personal names. For example, in Ebla we find a man named Mi-ka-il (Who is Like God?)—the modern Michael of course—and another, Mi-ka-ya (Who is like Ya?).” (In Howard LaFey, “Ebla: Splendor of an Unknown Empire,” National Geographic Dec. 1978, pp. 737-40.)

 

Tn years ago the mention of the name Jehovah in a first person account by Abraham might have been construed to be proof that the text was contrived, but the discovery that the name existed in Ebla in pre-Abrahamic times lends historic validity to the book of Abraham. (Jeffrey R. Chadwick, “First Person Abraham: The Book of Abraham in Light of Ancient History,” in The Seventh Annual Church Educational System Religious Educators’ Symposium on the Old Testament [Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1983], 34)

 

 On Exo 6:3, see, for e.g.:


T. Desmond Alexander on the use of the Divine Name Yahweh in Genesis and Exodus 6:3


JST Exodus 6:3-4 Changing the KJV to be God Asking a Question to Moses


Duane A. Garrett on Exodus 6:2c-3


Umberto Cassuto on Exodus 6:3