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).

I made this example previously, but will elaborate. Imagine the history of the automobile written from the perspective of the automobile. Chapter 1 says the human built the automobile, and in Chapter 2 it says Karl Benz the Human built the automobile, and it refers to “Karl Benz the Human” for a while, then just mentions ‘Karl Benz.”

Let’s say in Chapter 1 the human speaks in the first-person plural:we, us, our. This is something we can grasp; humans don’t do this stuff individually. In Chapter 2 and later Karl Benz also speaks the same way: we, us, our. This is very easy to grasp, because we assume he must have had a team of engineers, craftsmen, and business partners.

This could be a bad analogy, but it seems fitting by what we know so far, and if we forget what we think the Bible says later on, or ideas we’ve read or heard about God by other writers or the general culture.