A few clarifications to YK's response:
Q 1: Where does the Bible say God's name is Jehovah?
: Also, we know from Bible names like Jehoash and Jehoram, and Jehosaphat, that the first two syllables in the YHWH were JE & HO. So, the argument that no one knows the correct vowels that should be inserted in the YHWH abbreviation is simply not true.
As usual, You Know pretends to have certainty on a subject that is uncertain. The Watchtower Society at least is honest enough to acknowledge uncertainty about this point. Here is what the Society's 'bible encyclopedia' Insight on the Scriptures says about this:
*** it-2 7 Jehovah ***
The Codex Leningrad B 19 A, of the 11th century C.E., vowel points the Tetragrammaton to read Yehwah', Yehwih', and Yeho·wah'. Ginsburg’s edition of the Masoretic text vowel points the divine name to read Yeho·wah'. (Ge 3:14, ftn) Hebrew scholars generally favor “Yahweh” as the most likely pronunciation. They point out that the abbreviated form of the name is Yah (Jah in the Latinized form), as at Psalm 89:8 and in the expression Ha·lelu-Yah' (meaning “Praise Jah, you people!”). (Ps 104:35; 150:1, 6) Also, the forms Yehoh', Yoh, Yah, and Ya'hu, found in the Hebrew spelling of the names Jehoshaphat, Joshaphat, Shephatiah, and others, can all be derived from Yahweh. Greek transliterations of the name by early Christian writers point in a somewhat similar direction with spellings such as I·a·be' and I·a·ou·e', which, as pronounced in Greek, resemble Yahweh. Still, there is by no means unanimity among scholars on the subject, some favoring yet other pronunciations, such as “Yahuwa,” “Yahuah,” or “Yehuah.”
And here is what a recent
Watchtower article said:
*** w99 2/1 30-1 "Jehovah" or "Yahweh"? ***
In the Hebrew language, God’s name is written YHWH. These four letters, which are read from right to left, are commonly called the Tetragrammaton. Many names of people and places mentioned in the Bible contain an abbreviated form of the divine name. Is it possible that these proper names can provide some clues as to how God’s name was pronounced?According to George Buchanan, professor emeritus at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C., U.S.A., the answer is yes. Professor Buchanan explains: “In ancient times, parents often named their children after their deities. That means that they would have pronounced their children’s names the way the deity’s name was pronounced. The Tetragrammaton was used in people’s names, and they always used the middle vowel.”
Consider a few examples of proper names found in the Bible that include a shortened form of God’s name. Jonathan, which appears as Yoh·na·than' or Yehoh·na·than' in the Hebrew Bible, means “Yaho or Yahowah has given,” says Professor Buchanan. The prophet Elijah’s name is ´E·li·yah' or ´E·li·ya'hu in Hebrew. According to Professor Buchanan, the name means: “My God is Yahoo or Yahoo-wah.” Similarly, the Hebrew name for Jehoshaphat is Yehoh-sha·phat', meaning “Yaho has judged.”
A two-syllable pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton as “Yahweh” would not allow for the o vowel sound to exist as part of God’s name. But in the dozens of Biblical names that incorporate the divine name, this middle vowel sound appears in both the original and the shortened forms, as in Jehonathan and Jonathan. Thus, Professor Buchanan says regarding the divine name: “In no case is the vowel oo or oh omitted. The word was sometimes abbreviated as ‘Ya,’ but never as ‘Ya-weh.’ . . . When the Tetragrammaton was pronounced in one syllable it was ‘Yah’ or ‘Yo.’ When it was pronounced in three syllables it would have been ‘Yahowah’ or ‘Yahoowah.’ If it was ever abbreviated to two syllables it would have been ‘Yaho.’”— Biblical Archaeology Review.
These comments help us understand the statement made by 19th-century Hebrew scholar Gesenius in his Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures: “Those who consider that YHWH [Ye-ho-wah] was the actual pronunciation [of God’s name] are not altogether without ground on which to defend their opinion. In this way can the abbreviated syllables YHW [Ye-ho] and YW [Yo], with which many proper names begin, be more satisfactorily explained.”
Nevertheless, in the introduction to his recent translation of The Five Books of Moses, Everett Fox points out: “Both old and new attempts to recover the ‘correct’ pronunciation of the Hebrew name [of God] have not succeeded; neither the sometimes-heard ‘Jehovah’ nor the standard scholarly ‘Yahweh’ can be conclusively proven.”
No doubt the scholarly debate will continue. Jews stopped pronouncing the name of the true God before the Masoretes developed the system of vowel pointing. Thus, there is no definitive way to prove which vowels accompanied the consonants YHWH (YHWH). Yet, the very names of Biblical figures—the correct pronunciation of which was never lost—provide a tangible clue to the ancient pronunciation of God’s name. On this account, at least some scholars agree that the pronunciation “Jehovah” is not so “monstrous” after all.
: We know that God’s name had 3 syllables, not 2 as in Yahweh.
How do "we know" that?
: By the way, there was no “J” in Hebrew, so the “Y” is translated as “J” and “W” as “V.”
That's a terrible explanation. There was no "J" sound in Hebrew, but there was a "Y" sound, given by the letter yodh. A great deal of Biblical literature and translation work was done by German speaking people in the Middle Ages. In German the letter "J" is pronounced like "Y" is in English. Hence we have the use of "J" in a great deal of scholarly literature. In early English, the "J" was also pronounced like "Y" is in English today. That's why older technical words like "Jahwist" are pronounced, and today often spelled, as "Yahwist". Furthermore, in the Middle Ages almost every scholar spoke Latin, where the sound of "Y" was represented by the letter "J". Over time, English evolved such that the letter "J" was pronounced as it is today, with the hard "J" sound, and the letter "Y" took over the function of the earlier "J". This is why you can find the Tetragrammaton represented as YHWH, JHVH, YHVH, and JHWH. Over time, various scholars used different conventions.
As for the "W" and "V" sound a similar situation between German and English exists. Today the German "V" is pronounced like the English "W". Furthermore, in ancient Hebrew the consonant "vav" or "waw" was pronounced like "W" is in English today, whereas in modern Hebrew it's pronounced like the English "V". Today it's mostly a matter of taste whether one pronounces the letter as "W" or "V" and spells it as "waw" or "vav".
: Years ago someone asked Billy Graham who Jehovah was, and he responded that Jehovah was the tribal god of the Hebrews. Yet, the King James Bible that Mr. Graham used at the time says at Psalms 83:18 that “Jehovah is the Most High over all the earth.” Clearly, scholars and clergymen have a deeply ingrained bias against that name. Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, are just what the name of our religion implies; we endeavor to honor God’s name and help others to do so too.
This is a complete misrepresentation of the facts. Hardly any scholars or clergymen have a bias against the name of God. Some certainly do have a bias against the particular translation "Jehovah", largely for reasons having to do with their irritation at Jehovah's Witnesses having preempted the name for their own use. They have no bias against using the more accepted translation "Yahweh". A great many don't like to use any form of God's name per se, because of the fact that the original pronunciation is not known, and so they prefer to use the traditional "LORD" instead. Thus their bias is not against "God's name" as you lyingly insinuate, but against use of any name that is not known to be correct.
This kind of misrepresentation is similar to the way J. F. Rutherford and his successors used the generic term "Jehovah's witnesses" (note the lowercase "w") from the beginning in 1931 through the late 1970s. This allowed them to say things like, "Abel was the earliest of Jehovah's witnesses" and "Jesus was the greatest of Jehovah's witnesses" -- an obvious and blatant lie. It is a deliberate misuse of language for the purpose of deceiving people.
Q 2: What's an apostate?
: Simply put, an apostate is one who abandons their faith in God. Some religions might use terms like heretic or infidel to describe the phenomenon. In the context of Jehovah’s Witnesses, though, strictly speaking, an apostate is one who is not content to merely leave his own faith behind; the apostate generally actively speaks against his former faith in order to draw others away too, and poison the minds of those who might otherwise have an interest in the truth.
Put more simply, it is as I said: In JW lingo, an apostate is "anyone who publicly disagrees with Watchtower teachings". In practice within the JW community, a critic does not even have to ever have been a JW. The mere fact of voicing criticisms is enough to get them labeled. This is proved by You Know himself, since he labels a number of posters on this board "apostates" even though they've never been JWs. Additionally, in the minds of a great many JWs, anyone who leaves the JW religion is an apostate, even if they never say a word about their former religion. This is proved by actual experience.
This is another example of using a term so as to mislead people. JWs misappropriate the general biblical notion of "apostate", meaning "one who abandons God", and use it for "anyone who abandons the JW religion".
Q 3: What is the "Evil slave Vs Good slave"?
Readers will note that You Know's comments contained nothing but bald assertions, no proof, and nothing that refuted what other posters had to say about the proper view of Matthew 24.
Q 5: Why not give a child blood to save their lives? Can this be proven in the Bible also?
: The answer is that God forbids blood to be used to sustain life except in the individual whose blood it is.
Another lie. The Bible nowhere says anything about "sustaining life" by means of blood. Here again we find the standard JW misuse of language to support a claim. They take the phrase "do not eat blood" and generalize it -- without a shred of biblical support -- to "do not sustain life by blood".
: There are many places in the Bible where God tells us what his will is regarding life and blood. One place is in the 8th chapter of Genesis. After Noah’s flood Jehovah gave man permission to use animals for food but he strictly forbade eating the blood of an animal.
First, it was the 9th chapter of Genesis. Second, a careful look at Genesis 9:4 shows that it actually forbids eating flesh and blood together -- not flesh, and not blood -- but the two together. The New World Translation renders this clearly:
"Only flesh with its soul -- its blood -- you must not eat."
Anything beyond what is clearly stated is an interpretation, and neither you nor the Society have ever given a justification for the Society's further interpretation except through reference to the Mosaic Law -- a law that neither Christians nor the non-Jews who received the Noachian Law were required to obey.
This is proved conclusively by the text of Deuteronomy 14:21, where God explicitly allows Jews to sell dead, unbled carcasses to non-Jews for eating:
“YOU must not eat any body [already] dead. To the alien resident who is inside your gates you may give it, and he must eat it; or there may be a selling of it to a foreigner, because you are a holy people to Jehovah your God."
Because it is inconceivable that God would explicitly allow Jews to sell a dead carcass to a non-Jew to eat if such eating were a violation of a pre-existing law given to all mankind through Noah, it follows that Genesis 9:4 cannot be a universal prohibition on eating blood. Indeed, a careful exposition on all of the relevant scriptures shows that the real requirement is that anyone who kills an animal for food was required to pour out the blood as a sign of respect for the life-giver God. Since eating an already-dead carcass did not involve killing the animal, no blood had to be poured out. Whether the text implied a complete restriction on eating the blood that had been poured out is a minor matter and not relevant to the issue of blood transfusions. The Mosaic Law was far more restrictive than anything God had previously given, and nothing in it can be construed to apply to non-Jews -- except through the misleading, Pharisaic sophistry of people like JW leaders.
: ... Centuries later when Christianity was developing, the issue came up whether new Gentile converts should obey the Jewish Law that God had given them through Moses, which also had very strict rules about not eating the blood of animals. The decision was that they didn’t have to, except they did have to retain certain features of the Law, one of which was stated that all Christians should “abstain from blood.”
Wrong. Since Jesus Christ "fulfilled the Law", not a single one of its provisions had to be carried over to Christians. The notion of abstaining from blood therefore had to do with laws other than the Mosaic Law, and since the language of Acts 15 states that the apostles looked at everything Moses wrote -- which included Genesis -- the "abstain from blood" statement had to refer back to Genesis 9:4 and so could mean no more than "don't eat the blood of animals you kill for food".
: Of course blood transfusions didn’t exist then, but it is interesting that the apostles said to abstain from blood and not just ‘don’t eat blood.’
Being "interesting" is proof of nothing. The question immediately arises, "abstain from doing what with blood?" You cannot absolutely "abstain" from blood in a general sense, because it's coursing through your body. You can't avoid eating blood if you eat meat unless you boil it to death, as orthodox Jews do. You can't avoid touching blood if you bleed or if you're a surgeon or a mother of small children. So we find that the JW claim that "abstain from blood" 'obviously' includes abstaining from transfusions is just another excerices in lying sophistry, and is backed only by the claim of JW leaders that they speak for God, just as You Know next says:
: So, we understand that God’s declared special ownership of the life and blood of all creatures is absolute.
Right. "We" -- the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses -- "understand". Just like JW leaders once "understood" that vaccinations violated that same Genesis 9:4 and other scriptures that they now claim prohibit blood transfusions.
: Jesus once said: ‘He that loses his soul for my sake will find it, and he that seeks to save his soul will lose it.’ Jesus wasn’t of course urging us to be reckless with our lives. He was stating a principle that it is better to die because of conscience toward God, IF NECESSARY, rather than compromise our faith just to save our own necks, so-to-speak.
That's right, and because JW leaders have never shown that abstaining from a transfusion is NECESSARY, we see that their claims are a "going beyond what is written" and is condemned by the Bible.
: ... it is very rare that any of our people die because of not taking transfusions. In the case of minor children, it is more of an emotional issue.
Note how cavalier a JW defender can be with the lives of children.
Q 6: Where does the rule not to talk with family members who left from the Jehovah's Witness come from?
: That’s not exactly the way it is. Disfellowshipping does not dissolve all family ties. For example, a disfellowshipped husband still talks with his wife and so forth.
Here is yet another example of misleading. DF'ing cannot dissolve a marriage and cannot dissolve blood relations. A mother and daughter remain that no matter what.
: Disfellowshipping though breaks a spiritual bond of brotherhood. The Bible lays down the principle that a little bit of yeast ferments a whole lot of dough. So the Bible says to remove corrupt individuals from our midst. Not physically of course; but, we withdraw friendship from those who don’t live by the rules God lays down for his household.
Which in practice means that any DF'd person outside the immediate household must be shunned except for absolutely necessary family business. Such necessary business would include dealing with the death of a family member, but not much of anything of less significance. The Watchtower Society wants it to be a goal of every JW to limit contact as much as humanly possible.
In practice we find a great deal of abuse of DF'd people on the part of JWs. For example, if a DF'd person attends the funeral of a JW loved one, many JWs in the audience will simply walk out. A parent might force a DF'd child out on the street. Any number of other examples could be provided.
: Being a cop, you can appreciate that the police have a fraternity within their ranks. You have a special bond with you fellow officers that others simply don’t have. There are certain things that are expected of you too by other cops, right? And if any cop breaks the rules and dishonors the badge it reflects badly on all policemen and women. Such a one, then, runs the risk of being ostracized by the entire police community.
Except that such ostracism doesn't result in the abuse of the one ostracized.
Q 7: How can a person isolate themselves if you chose to knock on people’s doors outside your religion?
: We don’t isolate ourselves.
Here comes yet another round of misleading claims. A 'good' JW parent will forbid his or her children from having any social contact with non-JWs. JW children are forbidden from playing in school bands, singing in school choirs -- from doing anything at all that requires social contact except the bare minimum needed to fulfill school requirements.
: Jehovah’s Witnesses are very mush apart of the community. We go to schools and have jobs and interact within society on many levels.
Except socially.
: We just don’t wish to be apart of certain aspect of society for conscience sake.
Namely, the social aspect.
: Jesus said that he was no part of the world and that his followers would also be no part of the world and yet Christ, while being no part of the world was also the light of the world. Christians are also called upon to be a light to the world while being no part of it. So that’s why we don’t support political movements and various popular religious customs and so forth.
The social isolation goes far beyond what YK mentions here. JWs expect that some 6 billion people will soon die at the Battle of Armageddon, and because these people are viewed as wicked enough to deserve extermination by God, JWs are often gleeful about it.
Q 8: How can the Watchtower Society, control so many millions of people across the world from a headquarters in NY?
: We recognize the Watchtower has having been given authority by God, as I explained in connection with the faithful slave. So, in reality, the Watchtower’s authority is really Jehovah’s authority as expressed through his word. We greatly respect God and Christ so we also naturally respect those whom we recognize as Christ’s slaves. Jesus said to his apostles, as he sent them out to represent him, that if people would have the inclination to listen to Jesus then they would also listen to the ones whom Jesus sends to them.
Compare this to my explanation:
You have to understand the indoctrination process. When a person gradually comes to accept the teachings of JWs, he or she inevitably comes upon contradictory information or things that they would normally reject as ridiculous. But as they move along, various other JW teachings often convince them to put aside these reservations and eventually forget about them altogether. Thus it is the person who is willing to put aside his reasoning ability and conscience and accept what he is told only on the basis of claimed spiritual authority who eventually becomes a Jehovah's Witness. At that point, the person has fully accepted the claim that JW leaders speak for God, and so they do everything they're told, just as they would if God told them.
AlanF
