Sunday, September 23, 2007

Do you call Him LORD or Lord?

Ever notice when reading your Bible that you see Lord printed in all uppercase or small caps sometimes? As we print the Bible passage for the bulletin each week, we try to maintain the exact same printing as you'll find in your published Bible and that regularly means manually adjusting Lord using the small caps font feature in our publishing software. The English alphabet/language (who am I to be dissecting English?) doesn't convey the nuances of the Hebrew language like Hebrew text does; for one, English has fewer names for God than Hebrew does.

One minor tidbit I picked up in Bible College is that anytime you see LORD in all caps/small caps, it's specifically referring to YHWH or YAHWEH, commonly referred to as the Tetragrammaton. From the Preface to the New International Version, "...the translators adopted the device used in most English versions of rendering that name as "LORD" in capital letters to distinguish it from Adonai, another Hebrew word rendered "Lord," for which small letters are used.

The profs in Bible College also stressed that anytime we referenced to the books with numbers that we specifically use numerical numbers and NOT roman numerals such as 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings as opposed to I and II Samuel and I and II Kings. Though why this was stressed I'm still trying to figure out. Until I do, I won't require such usages in the Sunday bulletin, but we do attempt to faithfully reproduce the scripture text as accurately as possible.