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What's the Difference LORD or Lord
Today the pastor told us the difference between LORD, and Lord when
reading your bible. He said this information came from an Old
Testament professor named Dennis Kinlaw.
Look at verse 2 of Psalm 16: I said to the LORD, you are my Lord. We
need to understand something here. Notice... "I said to the LORD" - with
the LORD in all caps, (It should be in your Bible, if not get a new
Bible.) Then "you are my Lord", capitalized, but not all in caps, why is
that?
Here we find two occurrences of the word "lord" shown differently in the
same verse. In fact you'll see this throughout the Old Testament. Why?
When only the first letter is capitalized, it is
used as an honorific title. For example, Lord, King, Master, etc.
But when LORD is in all capital letters it is standing for a personal name
of God, i.e. Yahweh, Eloheim, Adanoih, Jehovah, Emmanuel, etc.
The pastor found it
interesting researching WHY this is. Here's why,... after the Babylonian
exile, the Judeans were very concerned that they never break God's law
again and suffer like they did. In order not to break the laws, they put
more laws around them.
Example, the speed limit is 65 and you wanted to make sure you never
broke the speed limit, so you put a governor on your car that prevented
you from going over even 55. That way you are sure not to break the
speed limit. Here's an Old Testament example:
How could you as a
Jew make sure you never break the old testament law that forbids boiling a
kid in it's mothers milk (it's there). Well, if you never eat a hamburger
and drink milk at the same time, you will not break that law. To this day
an orthodox Jew will not eat meat and milk together.
So when they came to
the commandment "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in
vain", they said "you know if we never pronounce his name we will not
break that commandment." Whenever they came to the name of God, they said
the word that means "lord" instead. They did this so thoroughly that
eventually they lost the pronunciation of the name that was given to Moses
at the burning bush, yahwah. Now you know that LORD in all caps is
representing a "name" of God, and Lord with only a capital "L" is a title,
not a name of God. |
