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Muslims say that الله is the name of God but when you translate it (Arabic to English) the result that comes up is God. So it's a title.
So what is God's name? YHWH? When we translate Yahweh from Hebrew (יהוה) to English. We get Jehovah.
So is Jehovah the name of God? Or was the real name known only to the people of Israel thousands of years ago and then forgotten over time during their worship of false gods? By the time they remembered God, they may have used just His title "God is Israel" and maybe Jehovah is just made from Adonai which means "My Lord" which may have stemmed from "The Lord - God of Israel".
No one knows how YHWH is pronounced and Yahweh means God, so it cannot be His name.
Ancient written Hebrew had no vowels, only consonants, with no vowels being used until the second half of the first millennium of the Common Era. Thus, all personal names were without any vowels, and the reader had to supply the vowel sounds. For example,
YHWH is often rendered as “Yahweh” (sometimes “Jahveh”) and is simply an attempt to express God’s name in a form nearer to the original Hebrew. God’s name in the older Hebrew manuscripts is shown as יהוה (YHWH or JHVH), and Bible commentators often refer to these characters as the “Tetragrammaton,” meaning “four letters.”
Down through the centuries, the correct pronunciation of the divine name in Hebrew has been lost. Hence, it is uncertain what vowels should be used to fill in the name. By combining vowel signs of the two Hebrew words
A·do·nay´ (Lord) and
El·o·him´ (God) with the Tetragrammaton, the pronunciation
Ye·ho·wah´ was formed. Eventually, in a Latinized form, this became “Jehovah.” Nevertheless, many Hebrew scholars say that “Yahweh” is more correct. But Rudolph Kittel, editor of
Biblia Hebraica, vowelizes the Hebrew tetragram as “Yehwah,” in all his editions.
The edition of the Hebrew text by C. D. Ginsburg (
Massoretico-Critical Text of the Hebrew Bible, London, 1926.) vowel-points
YHWH to read
Yeho·wah´. The text located in the former U.S.S.R.(now Russia), namely, the Codex Leningrad B 19A, used for
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), vowel-points the Tetragrammaton to read
Yehwah´,
Yehwih´ and a number of times
Yeho·wah´, as in Genesis 3:14. While many translators favor the pronunciation “Yahweh,” many Bibles continue to use the form “Jehovah” because of people’s familiarity with it for centuries. Moreover, it preserves, equally with other forms, the four letters of the divine name,
YHWH or
JHVH.
The practice of substituting titles for the divine name that developed among the Jews was applied in later copies of the Greek
Septuagint, the Latin
Vulgate, and many other translations, ancient and modern. Therefore,
A Greek-English Lexicon, by Liddell and Scott (LS), p. 1013, states: “ο Κύριος,=Hebr.
Yahweh, LXX Ge. 11.5, al.”
Also, the
Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods, by E. A. Sophocles, Cambridge, U.S.A., and Leipzig, 1914, p. 699, says under κύριος (
Ky´ri·os): “
Lord, the representative of יהוה.
Sept. passim [scattered throughout].”
Moreover,
Dictionnaire de la Bible, by F. Vigouroux, Paris, 1926, col. 223, says that “the Septuagint and the Vulgate contain Κύριος and
Dominus, ‘Lord,’ where the
original contains Jehovah.” Regarding the divine name,
A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, edited by J. Payne Smith, Oxford, 1979 reprint, p. 298, says that
Mar·ya’ “in the [Syriac] Pesh ita Version of the O. T. represents the Tetragrammaton.”
Jehovah’s name was first restored to the English Bible by William Tyndale. In 1530 he published a translation of the first five books of the Bible into English. He included Jehovah’s name once, in Exodus 6:3. In a note in this edition Tyndale wrote: “Iehovah is God’s name . . . Moreover, as oft as thou seist LORD in great letters (except there be any error in the printing) it is in Hebrew Iehovah.”
From this the practice arose among translators to use Jehovah’s name in just a few places, but to write “LORD” or “GOD” in most places where the Tetragrammaton occurs in Hebrew. This practice was adopted by the translators of the
King James Version in 1611, where Jehovah’s name occurs only four times, namely, in Exodus 6:3; Psalms 83:18; Isaiah 12:2 and 26:4.
Further,
Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Vol. 1, Chicago (1980), p. 13, says: “To avoid the risk of taking God’s name (YHWH) in vain, devout Jews began to substitute the word
’ǎdōnā(y) for the proper name itself. Although the Masoretes left the four original consonants in the text, they added the vowels ē (in place of ǎ for other reasons) and ā to remind the reader to pronounce
’ǎdōnā(y) regardless of the consonants. This feature occurs
more than six thousand times in the Hebrew Bible. Most translations use all capital letters to make the title ‘LORD.’ Exceptions are the ASV [
American Standard Version] and
New World Translation which use ‘Jehovah,’
Amplified
which uses ‘Lord,’ and JB [The Jerusalem Bible] which uses ‘Yahweh.’ . . . In those places where ’ǎdōnā(y) yhwh occurs the latter word is pointed with the vowels from ’ēlōhim, and the English renderings such as ‘Lord GOD’ arose (e.g. Amos 7:1).”
The greatest indignity that modern translators render to the Divine Author of the Holy Scriptures is the removal or the concealing of his peculiar personal name. Actually his name occurs in the Hebrew text 6,828 times as יהוה (YHWH or JHVH), generally referred to as the Tetragrammaton (literally meaning “having four letters”).
By using the name “Jehovah,” some Bibles, such as the American Standard Version and the New World Translation, have held closely to the original-language texts and have not followed the practice of substituting titles such as “Lord,” “the Lord,” “Adonai” or “God” for the divine name, the Tetragrammaton.
The translation committee of the American Standard Version of 1901 stated: “The American Revisers, after a careful consideration, were brought to the unanimous conviction that a Jewish superstition, which regarded the Divine Name as too sacred to be uttered, ought no longer to dominate in the English or any other version of the Old Testament, as it fortunately does not in the numerous versions made by modern missionaries. . . . This personal name [Jehovah], with its wealth of sacred associations, is now restored to the place in the sacred text to which it has an unquestionable claim.”—AS preface, p. iv.
