A review of God and The LORD, plus Genesis 12

Finding security in Pharaoh?

Welcome to the Daily Bible Chapter. My name is James Leroy Wilson and I invite you to join me as we discover new insights and new perspectives from a very old book.

A review of God and The LORD, plus Genesis 12

At this point, I’m reading both Young’s Literal Translation and the New Revised Standard Version. Before, I’ve made frequent distinctions between “God,” of Chapter 1, and the being known as “Jehovah God” or simply “Jehovah” in Young’s. This “Jehovah God” name is translated as “The LORD God” or simply “The LORD” (all capital letters) in the NRSV.

Early on I would refer to this character as Jehovah because, in our mind, that sounds quite distinct from “God.” Then I started writing “Jehovah/The LORD” to distinguish the name from “God.” From here on out I think I’ll just use the NRSV’s “The LORD.”

One reason I’ve emphasized the distinction between “the LORD” and GOD is because, throughout my life, the names “the LORD” and “God” were treated as indistinguishable. But the use of the different names seems important to the story even if this didn’t seem all that important to my Bible teachers (in Sunday School, confirmation classes, and college, though the latter did make greater note of it).