The divine name across the chart
The Hebrew writes God's name nearly 7,000 times. What each translation does with it is the sharpest line that can be drawn across this whole family tree — and three Bibles dropped it in twelve years.
The Hebrew Old Testament writes God’s name as four consonants — YHWH, the Tetragrammaton — nearly 7,000 times. The ✦ marks on the diagram show who prints a form of the name rather than a title.
| Bible | What stands where YHWH does |
|---|---|
| Tyndale, KJV | the LORD in small capitals; Jehovah in a handful of places only — Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, Isaiah 12:2 and 26:4 in the KJV |
| Douay-Rheims, Knox | the Lord, following the Vulgate’s Dominus |
| Young’s Literal 1862 | ✦ Jehovah |
| Emphatic Diaglott 1864 | ✦ Jehovah — in the New Testament, where no Greek manuscript has it |
| Darby 1890 | ✦ Jehovah in the Old Testament |
| American Standard Version 1901 | ✦ Jehovah, everywhere |
| Rotherham | ✦ Yahweh |
| Moffatt 1926 | ✦ the Eternal — a third answer, and almost the only Bible that gives it |
| Byington | ✦ Jehovah |
| New World Translation | ✦ Jehovah — 6,973 times in the Hebrew Scriptures and 237 in the Christian Greek Scriptures |
| Jerusalem Bible 1966 | ✦ Yahweh, in essentially every place the Hebrew has the name — the first major English Bible to print it consistently |
| New Jerusalem Bible 1985 | ✦ Yahweh, kept |
| World English Bible 1997→ | ✦ Yahweh in the classic edition; the WEB Updated went back to the LORD |
| Holman Christian Standard 2004 | ✦ Yahweh, but selectively — some 75 places in 2004, about 495 in 2009, never all 7,000 |
| CTS New Catholic Bible 2007 | dropped — the Jerusalem Bible with the Lord put back |
| Christian Standard Bible 2017 | dropped — the LORD throughout, reversing the HCSB |
| Revised New Jerusalem Bible 2019 | dropped — the LORD throughout |
| Legacy Standard Bible 2021 | ✦ Yahweh, everywhere — the one recent Bible moving the other way |
| RSV, NRSV, ESV, NAB, NIV, NEB/REB, Good News, NET, The Message and the Catholic editions | the LORD |
Read the table by date and a pattern falls out
The divine name entered mainstream English Bibles in the nineteenth century through translators working alone — Young, Wilson, Darby, Rotherham — carried into one committee Bible in 1901, and reached its widest audience in the Jerusalem Bible of 1966.
Then three Bibles dropped it in twelve years: the CTS edition in 2007, the CSB in 2017, the RNJB in 2019, each for its own reasons. The World English Bible’s updated edition quietly did the same. The Legacy Standard Bible of 2021 is the only recent movement in the other direction.
American Standard Version, 1901
The American revisers’ most conspicuous break with the English committee: Jehovah, everywhere, where the English Revised Version had kept “the LORD.”
It matters out of proportion to the ASV’s own circulation, because so much descends from it. The World English Bible inherited the practice directly. The RSV, NASB, Amplified and Living Bible did not.
The HCSB is the clearest case of a translation changing its mind
Because the same publisher did both.
The Holman printed Yahweh in some 75 places in 2004 and widened that to about 495 in its 2009 revision; the 2017 revision took it out altogether and went back to the LORD.
No liturgical directive was involved, as it was for the Jerusalem family — it was a readability and consistency decision. Two different traditions, two different reasons, the same reversal.
Why the Jerusalem family reversed itself
Nothing in the translating required it.
In June 2008 the Congregation for Divine Worship, under Cardinal Arinze, wrote to every bishops’ conference directing that the Tetragrammaton is “neither to be used nor pronounced” in the liturgy, and is to be rendered by the equivalent of Adonai / Kyrios — in English, Lord — as the Septuagint and the Vulgate had done.
The letter itself says only that it was issued “by directive of the Holy Father, in accord with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” The story that Benedict XVI acted after the Chief Rabbi of Rome raised Jewish discomfort at the Name being pronounced, at an audience in January 2006, circulates and is plausible, but it is not in the letter and is not claimed here as its cause.
The RNJB was built for the lectionary, so it followed. The Jerusalem line therefore both introduced the divine name to mainstream English Bible readers and then withdrew it, fifty-three years apart.
⚠️ The Bible on the shelf is not the text read at Mass
The Jerusalem Bible prints Yahweh wherever the Hebrew has the name. The lectionary made from it never did.
The 1969 and 1981 lectionaries built on the Jerusalem Bible read the Lord where the Bible on the shelf reads Yahweh — on Trinity Sunday the lectionary has Deuteronomy 4:39 as “the Lord is God indeed” where the Jerusalem Bible has “Yahweh is God indeed.”
The Catholic Truth Society edition of 2007 simply brought the printed Bible into line with the lectionary — a year before the 2008 directive. The directive made a rule of what the English-language lectionary was already doing.
So there was no withdrawal at Mass in Ireland to come: the name was never proclaimed there from the Jerusalem Bible.
(That the lectionary read “the Lord” from the start is checked here on one reading, Deuteronomy 4:39, not on the whole three-volume set.)
The Revised New Jerusalem Bible
What the RNJB changed is the Bible on the shelf, which until 2019 still had the name. Built for the lectionary, and following where the lectionary had already gone, it prints the LORD throughout.
It is the last step in a fifty-three-year round trip: the Jerusalem line introduced the divine name to mainstream English Bible readers, and the Jerusalem line withdrew it.
The Legacy Standard Bible
A 2021 revision of the NASB 1995 that writes the divine name out as “Yahweh” throughout — the one recent English Bible moving toward the name rather than away from it, and it arrived two years after the RNJB moved the other way.
The World English Bible
A public-domain modernisation of the ASV, so it inherited “Yahweh” in its classic edition. The WEB Updated, now the base for its newer variants, went back to the LORD — the same reversal as the CSB, and for much the same reason.