How does the Adonai cookie crumble into Greek Yoghurt?

TODAY, WE’RE AIMING HIGH, attempting to answer the question of how the Hebrew title “Adonai” was translated into Greek. It’s a bit tricky and nuanced, but I believe doable, now with the help of my conversation with Albert Pietersma. As a micro-recap, we have seen recently that, generally speaking:

• Yahweh has hugely-greater frequency than Adonai, which is particularly rare in the Pentateuch.
• Adonai leans a lot on Yahweh when it occurs, the two usually appearing together in a “combo” format.
• There are Jewish traditions, manuscript retranscription hesitations and errors that point to semantic proximity and even overlap of the two terms, Adonai and Yahweh.

For further reference please see the bottom of today's post for where to look.

So as I reach into the theological fridge for my Greek yoghurt to share the news about how the Adonai translation went, I wanted to also let you know that my email to Albert Pietersma received a short but meaningful response. I basically wrote to him an edited form of my 2016 post: Why This Research Matters, in which I highlight two important differences between Yahweh and Adonai translations into Greek within the book of Psalms: Yahweh still receives special treatment grammatically with fewer articles than expected, in line with the tradition of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, on one sample lexical unit, ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον, I seemed to have a clear point, with only Adonai receiving the middle word in the Greek there, “τὸν”, or “the Lord”. At the time of writing the email I didn’t know it yet, but a third differentiating factor arises for Psalms. But surely, even with these two differentiating factors alone, Pietersma was going to have to recognise that this Mr. Nobody here had stumbled over a wrong-headed assumption and perhaps now reconsider how his NETS translation handled “the Lord”? I'd still like them to do that by the way.  Here's what Pietersma said and how combined with the results I am going to share with you today, there is good cause for me to rethink my overall picture of Adonai translation:

AP: I wonder if our respective foci aren’t at odds.  My point here is simply that the Hebrew divine names Yahweh, Yah, and Adonai are all rendered by Greek kyrios. Differently put, though the translator might have opted for transcriptions like Yao, Ya, or Adonai, by opting for kyrios he foregoes differentiation at the word level. Period! Full stop! Needless to say, differentiation at the grammatical remains an option, but that is a different issue. Yes?

First of all: fantastic to be able to get direct insights from specialists like Pietersma! Second, yes the Greek translators could quite easily have avoided any differentiation issues by transcribing the words differently. If they'd really wanted to incorporate a Kyrios translation for one of them, they could have left the other untouched by transliterating it into the new alphabet. Actually, I should probably mention that transliteration does very occasionally happen for both:

• ·       For Yahweh, toward the end of Psalms, you may notice this standalone line often repeated at the end of these smaller Psalms: Praise the LORD! In the Hebrew you have two words for this, הַֽלְלוּ־יָֽהּ - “Hallal” and “Yah” (as in Yahweh), which in Greek combine to form the single: αλληλουια, literally, Allelujah! 
• ·       For Adonai, on one of the Old Greek manuscripts passed down to us in Judges 16:28, it reads Αδωναιε κύριε for the NASB of: “Then Samson called to the LORD and said, “O Lord GOD...”. Here this translator in this manuscript does something I have seen hardly anywhere else[i], transliterating the Hebrew Adonai into Greek Αδωναιε.

However, exceptions prove the rule sometimes, and that is the case here - thank you Dr. Pietersma for reminding me of this glaring option.

So, the translators chose, collectively and more or less unanimously, to use the same Greek word κύριε to translate both of these different Hebrew names for the Israelite Deity, Adonai and Yahweh.

Yet Pietersma seems to acknowledge the possibility of grammatical differentiation. Yet, how significant should the grammatical issue that I raise be and how on Earth would you represent that in an English translation like NETS?

Well, when producing a massive translation project such as any Bible you might have at home, consult in a seminary or look up online, you are benefitting from the fruit of ridiculous numbers of hours of collaboration to maintain consistency of practice across the whole thing. So if striving to produce a single-volume translation where grammatical differences occur consistently throughout the texts, then you might want to consider a strict translation scrapping the English article for LORD (Yahweh) and maintaining it for the Lord (Adonai). To most readers, I think this could seem confusing or like a curious typo. But hang on a second, is there a consistency of practice across the whole thing? Isn’t one of the point of NETS to draw out the particularities of each book? To answer these questions we need to see what actually happens to the articles in the Greek translation of Adonai in nominative and genitive cases across the Septuagint:

Adonai into nominative and genitive Kyrios

	LXX nominative + genitive arthrous (HUMAN LORD FIGURE)	LXX nominative + genitive anarthrous (HUMAN LORD FIGURE)	Adown - human lord - "arthricity"	LXX nominative + genitive arthrous (GOD)	LXX nominative + genitive anarthrous (GOD)	Adonai - GOD - "arthricity"
In total	107	6	94.7%	15	327	4.4%
Genesis	25	1	96.2%	0	0	n/a
Exodus	1	0	100.0%	1	2	33.3%
Numbers	2	0	100.0%	0	0	n/a
Deuteronomy	1	0	100.0%	0	1	0.0%
Joshua	0	0	n/a	0	2	0.0%
Judges	2	0	100.0%	0	0	n/a
Ruth - Job	72	4	94.7%	0	6	0.0%
Psalms & Proverbs	1	1	50.0%	11	12	47.8%
Isaiah	2	0	100.0%	1	42	2.3%
Jeremiah	0	0	n/a	0	6	0.0%
Lamentations	0	0	n/a	1	11	8.3%
Ezekiel	0	0	n/a	1	212	0.5%
Daniel-Malachi	1	0	100.0%	0	33	0.0%

 

Result: Like we expect of Yahweh, Adonai (and Adown) applied to God receives the same treatment as Yahweh, not many articles at all, with the exception of Psalms. When a human referent is presented, the presence of articles is radically higher. Rather than representing a Bible-wide tendency of article-adding to Adonai translation, Psalms is actually the outlier by far! Amazing how quickly our expectations can skew our analysis.

It might seem puzzling to see books missing in the table above or even fewer counts than mentioned in my recent posts discussing relatively low occurrence rates of Adonai. The reason for this is to do with how Greek articles can be seen to function even with proper names in certain cases. It has been clear to me for almost two years now since I started thinking about the Greek “anarthrous” translation of Yahweh that this anarthrous rule is only really particularly discernible in the nominative and genitive Greek cases. Of the remaining three, accusative, dative and vocative, “Lord” in the accusative (κύριον) and dative (κυρίῳ) needs lots of articles, while in the vocative (κύριε) it virtually never requires an article. So I hope that helps explain why we are looking at even fewer instances of Adonai and why in the table above many books are not represented or have been grouped together - they may literally have zero occurrences of a translation of Adonai into the nominative (κύριος) or genitive (κυρίου) cases. 

But where we do have data, apart from the Psalms, we can deduce that Adonai seems to have been “swept along” with Yahweh's anarthrous rule, with very low rates of what I am calling “arthricity”, i.e. articles relative to what we might expect on average for a normal title. 

The Pentateuch Legacy

Before we move to examples of genitive or nominative translation beyond the Pentateuch, let's illustrate this similarity of Adonai and Yahweh translation by going back to some of the vocative texts. These would have been among the very first to be translated into Greek in the third-century BCE Septuagint project targeting the first five books, including significant passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy:

Exodus 15:17 (NASB): 

“You will bring them and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance,

The place, O LORD [Yahweh => κύριε], which You have made for Your dwelling,

The sanctuary, O Lord [Adonai => κύριε], which Your hands have established.

Deuteronomy 3:24 (NASB)

‘O Lord GOD [Adonai Yahweh => κύριε κύριε], You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your strong hand; for what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and mighty acts as Yours?

• In Exodus 15:17 we have simple parallelism with undifferentiated κύριε.
• In both Deuteronomy 3:24 and 9:26 we have an Adonai-Yahweh “combo“ reflected in a simple repetition of “κύριε κύριε”.

We know that Yahweh is a super-common term in the Pentateuch (see Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord and BlueLetterBible search here), especially once Moses receives the revelation of Yahweh’s name in early Exodus. We can also assume that any term selected had to be meaningful but also practical in order to help Jews avoid recreating issues of tiptoeing around the Name all over again in the new host language. So Exodus and Deuteronomy simply substitute in this solution and aren't fussed by the repetition. Let's look now though at two combos from Genesis, which do seem to reflect an early concern about repetition:

Genesis 15:2 (NASB)

Abram said, “O Lord GOD [Hebrew: Adonai Yahweh => Greek: δέσποτα => NETS: “O Master”], what will You give me, since I am childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”

Genesis 15:8 (NASB)

“He said, “O Lord GOD [Hebrew: Adonai Yahweh => Greek: δέσποτα κύριε => NETS: “O Master, Lord”], how may I know that I will possess it?”

What is the nature of this apparent concern? As I said, we know that there is nothing super-sacred about saying “Lord” or “Master” in and of itself, as they are used throughout the Greek Bible and as these are terms also used for human rulers. But what is going on with Gen 15:2 throwing in this new word “δέσποτα” to translate both Yahweh and Adonai simultaneously and why is it different in 15:8? Actually, the Genesis translator in both instances achieves something that the translator of Deuteronomy was apparently not so concerned about: avoiding redundant repetition. What doesn't matter - if you are the Genesis translator - is quite how you go about that avoidance work. Heck, Adonai occurs so rarely (at this stage), it's not like you need to scratch your head for ages to come up with some complex rule, so it just doesn't matter if there is inconsistency between 15:2 and 15:8.

A final point from the Pentateuch: because Adonai can be used to say “my Lord”, conveyed in Greek “the Lord of me”, the article must be maintained here (see Exodus 34:9 “ὁ κύριός μου”). The translator team are simply not fussed that the non-possessable Yahweh will become indistinguishable from the possessable Adonai in their fused translation.

Thus we can summarise that the first translator team left a legacy for subsequent translators with the following approximate set of implicit instructions:

• Treat Adonai as you would Yahweh
• Try to avoid repeating κύριε when you can, but there are none of the theological stakes of the Hebrew originals
• Adonai possessives will need to follow usual Greek rules with the article

Nearly all the subsequent translators “got the memo”.

Subsequent Hebrew History strengthens the emerging Adonai-Yahweh synonymy

Initially, Joshua translator seems to be aware of the Genesis translation alternative of despota (Jos 5:14) and affirms the simple parallelism in 3:11 and 3:13 with genitive application: “the ark of the Lord [Adonai]” and “the ark of the LORD [Yahweh], the Lord [Adonai] of the whole Earth”. Previously, only two anarthrous genitives had preceded this, both of which were combos (Ex. 23:17 and 34:23). Like Exodus, he continues to avoid this redundancy, via condensing into a single κυρίου or κύριε (3:13 and 7:7).

Judges translator only has 4 Adonai to work with and continues the work of redundancy avoidance in 16:28 with the exceptional Αδωναιε κύριε (see above) and seems to experiment in 6:22 with a possessive to separate the two κύριέ: κύριέ μου κύριε, which will be picked up in later historical books. So Adonai is still rare at this stage and all four occur in the typical vocative – O Lord – sense.

Ruth: no Adonai to work with.

Samuel has a super-concentrated passage in 2 Sam 7:18-29 (which will certainly have interested source critics), providing all of a sudden six Adonai-Yahweh combos. This translator picks up on Judges translator’s κύριέ μου κύριε and slams it down for all six occurrences of the Adonai-Yahweh combos in 2 Sam 7. Perhaps we could speculate that Judges and Samuel translators’ (assuming they are not one and the same translator) double-emphasis of Yahweh's lordship is maintained and the inelegance of the strict repetition of κύριέ κύριε is avoided. 

Kings appears to be from a different translating mind again although with the same legacy behind him. This translator doesn't mind the inelegance of repetition (1 Ki 8:53), and reasserts that Yahweh's stuff can be stated in exactly the same terms as Adonai's stuff, anarthrously. Our two examples here are “the ark of the covenant of Adonai” (1 Ki 3:15) and the anarthrous lexical unit “ἐνώπιον κυρίου” here applied to Adonai as with Yahweh: “in the sight of Adonai”. 1 Ki 22:6 and 2 Ki 7:6 introduce our first conspicuous nominative anarthrous for Adonai: κύριος (no “ὁ”). 

Ezra 10:3 and its translation are not relevant to my survey as the Greek translator clearly understands a human referent and deviates from the Hebrew in any case. 

Nehemiah is on redundancy alert in 10:29, appearing to accept some sacrifice of the initial proper name character of Yahweh (“observe all the commandments of Yahweh, our Lord” => “observe all the commandments of our Lord”). 

Job's a bit weird - but it's interesting in the divine aspect of Adonai. In 28:28 we read the rather famous line: “Behold, the fear of the Lord (Adonai), that is wisdom”. In Greek this becomes something more like “God-worship, that is wisdom”.

Isaiah

Moving ahead into the prophets, the redundancy issue of what I am calling “Adonai-Yahweh combos” intensifies for the translators, and will reach its climax in Ezekiel. The Isaiah translator in 1:24 and 3:1 keeps to an already Greek-transliterated divine name “Sabaoth” (e.g. 1 Samuel 1:3, NETS: “Lord God Sabaoth”) after avoiding a repetition via δεσπότης instead of the usual condensed κύριος to translate Adonai alongside Yahweh. We have already seen this, of course, precedented back in Genesis. NETS shifts path slightly here, going for the rather peculiar “the Sovereign, the Lord Sabaoth, says”.

3:15 simply avoids translating Adonai-Yahweh completely - this avoidance tactic is evidenced elsewhere too. Generally, repetition avoidance is systematic in Isaiah. 3:17 applies an explicit divine swap similar to the Job instance while 3:18 introduces us to the first of many (35) anarthrous simple nominative translations for Adonai into κύριος, with only one articulated instance “ὁ κύριος” in 49:14. As opposed to my initial expectations (which were partly influenced by scholars like Wever's comments), Isaiah, if anything, is stronger on the anarthrous rule even than the Pentateuch itself!  Genitive translations of Adonai are also consistently anarthrous, even when a Yahweh combo is not at stake (see 28:2, ὁ θυμὸς κυρίου, the wrath of [the] Lord).

Jeremiah and Lamentations

Jeremiah translator appears to be different to Isaiah and doesn't transliterate “Sabaoth” and isn't quite as systematic in combo redundancy avoidance (44:26 reads the double-anarthrous of “κύριος κύριος”), but is utterly faithful to article avoidance throughout the six nominative forms of κύριος (there are no genitives).

Lamentations is worth a separate mention in that its Adonai occurrences are all super-relevant to this survey, occurring separately from Yahweh (no combos) and nearly exclusively in the cases we are integrating (nominative and genitive). Result? Only 1 occurrence out of 12 relevant occurrences includes the article (1:15a): 8%. I particularly appreciate the existence of the Lamentations translation witness because it allows us to see Adonai treatment more independently from direct Yahweh translation influences of the many combos in the other Hebrew books in the Hebrew canon surrounding it, and this figure of 8.3% happens to remain very consistent with what we have learned to expect from Pentateuch-Yahweh-translation rates. 

Ezekiel: thus says Adonai-Yahweh aka κύριος

Ezekiel is the big mama of any study on Adonai because of a single saying, repeated so often it's like a mantra. The full version in Hebrew it reads unwaveringly: אָמַר אֲדֹנָי יְהֹוִֽה, “thus says [the] Lord”. The Greek varies slightly between λέγει κύριος and λέγει κύριος κύριος. I suspect my count not to be perfect, but the following statistical overview should give a good idea:

• Of the 224 Adonai in Ezekiel, 213 occurrences are nominative or genitive and 212 are anarthrous 
• There are 215 Adonai-Yahweh combos and the translator avoids repetition 166 times (77%) via condensation into a single κύριος
• λέγει κύριος also translates “says Yahweh” when no Adonai is present (e.g. 4:13)

Daniel and the Minor Prophets

The translations of these prophetic texts are entirely anarthrous when it comes to translating Adonai into the nominative (29 times) and the genitive (twice).

Daniel's few contributions to Adonai are mainly vocative “O Lord”, but there is one nominative κύριος in 1:2, rendered anarthrously. Hosea has a single nominative κύριος in 12:14, also rendered anarthrously. Next, Amos is a major Adonai user, if you remember the concentrations I reported, featuring the highest Adonai concentration in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its 24 occurrences mean that one word in every 126 is “Adonai”. Amos translator is pretty varied in his approach to the 21 Adonai-Yahweh combos: usually he'll tend to avoid the possibility of repeating “κύριος κύριος”, but not always (5:3, 7:2, 7:5, 9:5), and the avoidance tactics are twofold: either condensing into a single κύριος or replacing one of the κύριος with “ὁ θεός” (God, e.g. 8:9).

Obadiah in 1:1, Habakkuk in 3:19 and Zephaniah in 1:7 all solve their respective Adonai-Yahweh combos in line with Amos' “ὁ θεός” substitution method and Micah uses the condensing method for 1:2. Micah is also anarthrous when he translates a combo and a simple Adonai occurrence, all within his second verse!

Zechariah is interesting in that he borrows a pre-existing Greek translation lexical unit as a new tactic for redundancy avoidance on the Adonai-Yahweh problem, we could call it his borrowed “παντοκράτωρ” substitution method - Pantokrator, sounds like some kind of cool dinosaur or transformer or something (Pantokrator was already employed alongside kyrios in 2 Samuel 7 and Chronicles, before seeing a markedly heavy usage into the prophets). Actually, in keeping with the powerful dinosaur image, the word came to mean “Almighty”, although originally was associated with “hosts” or “armies”.

Rounding off the Hebrew Bible, Malachi remains in perfect keeping, it would seem, with the sharing of the anarthrous rule to Adonai translations, with an anarthrous genitive κυρίου in 1:12 and an anarthrous nominative κύριος in 3:1.

Ok - erm, John, wait a minute, haven't you forgotten about the Psalms?!

Psalms: the Outlier

Don’t worry, I definitely have not forgotten the Psalms! As stated, Psalms appears in a different state in the current critical Greek text to the rest of the Septuagint with respect to its translation of Adonai now on at least three independent criteria:

1    1.     Greek articles: Adonai to nominative Kyrios and genitive Kyriou translation “arthricity” rate of 50% relative to Yahweh rate of 18%.
2.       ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον: it turns out that "ἐπὶ" before κύριον when translating "to Yahweh" systematically removes the accusative article τὸν: Ps 4:5, Ps 21:7, Ps 22:8, Ps 31:24, Ps 32:10 and 11, Ps 37:3, Ps 40:3, Ps 55:22. Not so in Psalm 130:6 translating Adonai.
3.       Adonai-Yahweh redundancy indifference: Psalms translator makes by far the least effort of any of the translators to remove the redundancy of Adonai-Yahweh combos (only one time out of thirteen, in 30:8).

What should NETS or other modern translations do with this information? First I need to think about what am I going to do with this information? As I already confessed, I used to think, erroneously, that Psalms was the example for the rest of the LXX. Now, on the above criteria, it is the clear outlier. But Pietersma handed me another important criterion: synonymy. Here, Psalms does much better, even falls into step with the rest of the LXX and should not be neglected.

Psalm 38:15:   For I hope in You, O LORD;

                         You will answer, O Lord my God.

(ὅτι ἐπὶ σοί κύριε ἤλπισα σὺ εἰσακούσῃ κύριε ὁ θεός μου)

Psalm 97:5:    The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the LORD, 

                                                                  At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.

(ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου
    ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου!)

Maybe in the months and years ahead a more detailed analysis will reveal more reasons for the Psalms grammatical differentiation, e.g. in relation to the more modest increase in Greek articles for Yahweh translations, the specific genre and poetic goals of the translators within their understanding of the genre and so on. But these examples should still serve as a witness that even Psalms translator sees Adonai and Yahweh as synonymous at critical points.

Another hypothesis well worth testing out in my view: that the Psalms translation took place earlier (or later) than the bulk of the other translations and represents an earlier and less complete assimilation of Adonai to Yahweh.

Some options for translations based on this research

Because of this synonymy criterion, NETS and other translations are probably safe to continue treating Adonai and Yahweh similarly, perhaps even scrapping the small caps “Lord” system or applying it to non-combo Adonai also. If you want to borrow the idea of translating the Hebrew into “Lord” from the Greek translators, why not do it as they did it? Sometimes, however, we have seen translation committees opt for transliteration, both in ancient and more recent times.

• 1.       Transliterate both Adonai and Yahweh. If we want to be most faithful to the most original form of the Old Testament text, then we should consider the possibility of simply stating “Adonai” for ינָדֹאֲ and “Yahweh” for הוִ֗היְ֝ . That, however, would lose a sense of lordship that would have been there for the Hebrews on Adonai.
• 2.       Transliterate Yahweh but translate Adonai to “Lord”. A problem here is that once you introduce a title for either term, then the issue of the article comes up in an artificial way since we have seen it affects both terms. However, given the scarcity of Adonai references and the space for removing articles that “Lord Yahweh” still provides, that might not be a major problem.
• 3.       Translate Yahweh and Adonai to one of the following

a.       “the Lord”

b.      “the Lord”

c.       “Lord”

d.      “Lord”

This option also helps make sense of reading the New Testament’s many citations of the Greek Old Testament.

For a translation like NETS that seems to want to highlight specific book translations and structure, my money is on a representative version of 3, where the grammatical distinctions of both Psalms and human Lords could be represented via the presence or absence of the English definite article, “the”.

For a more harmonising translation, the rendering needn’t be complicated by Psalms’ divergent grammatical practice and could translate Yahweh and Adonai consistently throughout as “Lord” or “Lord”.

OK, that pretty much wraps it up for today, I hope you have found it interesting or informative and my handling of Adonai careful. My next steps are to proceed with the Yahweh arthricity rates, which is a much significant data set than Adonai (readers may recall that I have myself only done Psalms and Ezekiel for the time being).

Related posts:

How does the Adonai cookie crumble? (part 2: Hebrew)

How does the Adonai cookie crumble?

Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord

“Euphemism”: A Critical Response to Koog Hong

Some of the disagreement about origins of the divine Name translation laid out

Yahweh's STUFF!

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results

Is Jesus' Other Name “Yahweh” for the first-century church? Part 1: The Data

Why This Research Matters

Larry Perkins: paper review

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[i] Judges 13:8 also mentions Αδωναιε alongside κύριε, albeit in the reverse order and constitutes a simple addition (i.e. does not serve to remove an Adonai-Yahweh redundancy) and Jeremiah in 34:5 uses αδων to translate a theatricalised scene of subjects calling out in lament for their human master.

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How does the Adonai cookie crumble? (part 2: Hebrew)

I SHEEPISHLY YET confidently admit my results on Adonai have surprised me, humbled me, and caused me to question how to proceed. Readers may remember that I have already shown in 2016 some results on the book of Psalms that were particularly telling: a diminished faithfulness by the Psalms translators to the "anarthrous rule" principle introduced for the initial Torah translation project, but an Adonai rate of articles that far outpaced the Yahweh "arthricity", and even a special case of ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον (Adonai in Psalm 130:6) vs. ἐπὶ κύριον (Yahweh in Ps 4:5, Ps 21:7, Ps 22:8, Ps 31:24, Ps 32:10, Ps 32:11, Ps 37:3, Ps 40:3 and Ps 55:22).

I thus overly quickly drew a sketch in my mind about how:

1. Adonai was distinct from Yahweh, and treated grammatically according to that difference
2. The Greek translation of Yahweh as anarthrous kyrios goes right back to the original Alexandrian translation.

Thus far, I still believe in the second point. But like Hong, we need to be careful in describing how the translation issue is distinct from and connected to the Hebrew written-spoken practice issue. Although you are still going to have to wait until my next post to see why my results are humbling me to reconsider 1, let's scrap my original plan and align it with the reality of the best available critical editions of the texts.

Let's start by simply pasting here a Hebrew lexical entry for Adonai as a more logical starting point and reference (i.e. one that leaves Greek translation to the side for a moment) [source, slightly antiquated: Gesenius' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon]:

I'm not going to explore here all the ins and outs of Hebrew distinctions between plural of majesty or number etc. hinted at by the lexicon, but I will expand on it as follows and introduce a fun and more memorable term of "combo" (by the way, please take my counts as "approximate" as I haven't been able to double check all the arising data):

• As Koog showed, manuscripts have shown fluidity and even hesitation between Adonai and Yahweh in the Hebrew during retranscription.

• Adonai frequently occurs as a combo with Yahweh. I am particularly interested in tracing the relationship of Adonai to Yahweh, so am focussing on the most common type, Adonai-Yahweh combos. These result in English translation alternatives you may be familiar with, such as "Lord GOD" or "Sovereign LORD" (e.g. Gen 15:2, Ex 23:17, De 3:24, Jos 3:13, Jdg 6:22, 2Sa 7:18, 1Ki 2:26, Neh 10:29, Ps 16:2, Is 1:24, Ezekiel en masse, Amos 1:8, Oba 1:1, Zep 1:7, Zec 9:14). In fact, in the Hebrew occurrences I have examined, 319 out of the 453 occurrences of Adonai referring to God are Adonai-Yahweh combos, of which 215 are in Ezekiel and 21 are in Amos. In other words, if Adonai occurs, there's a 69% chance that it is occurring alongside Yahweh, probably before it. Can you see just how close the relationship is between the two terms? Back to this in the next post though because any further generalisations could be skewed by Ezekiel's "thus-says-the-Lord-GOD" mantra.

• Lord or O Lord in the vocative (e.g. Gen 18:3, Ex 4:10, Nu 14:17, De 3:24, Jos 7:7, Jdg 6:15, 2Sa 7:18, 1Ki 8:53, Neh 1:11, Ps 8:1, Is 6:11, Je 1:6, Lam 3:58, Ez 9:8, Dan 9:4, Amos 7:5), imploring God, is also quite an important usage for Adonai, 76 times. Note that vocative usage is not mutually exclusive to the 319 combos referred to in the previous point, but more frequently occur without Yahweh than with (47 x "O Lord" vs 29 x "O Lord GOD"). It is important to note for the Greek issue in advance, that of the scant representation of the Adon root in the Pentateuch - a mere 19 occurrences - thirteen of the nineteen are in the vocative, of which six are recorded alongside Yahweh. Thus we can speculate: vocative was apparently the initial style of Adonai.

  “The sanctuary, O Lord [Adonai], which Your hands have established."

   Exodus 15:17

• Other normal and independent usage occurs around 88 times. 
• For the Pentateuch, of course, it is very limited, and basically comprises "speaking to Adonai" (e.g. Gen 18:27),  beseeching Adonai, "may Adonai do x" (Ex. 34:9), and in De 10:17 he is the "Adonai of all Adonai". 
• Beyond the Pentateuch, non-combo-dependant Adonai extends to include: 
• some of Adonai's stuff (e.g. "Adonai's covenant", Jos 3:11, 1 Ki 3:15, "Adonai's table", Mal 1:12, etc.)
• Adonai titles, such as "Adonai of the whole Earth" (Jos 3:13); 
• "my Adonai" (Jos 5:14, Ps 35:23, )
• "in the sight of Adonai" (1 Ki 3:10); 
• the main subject of a sentence, i.e. "Adonai does x to y at z" (e.g. "Adonai says/said", e.g. Amos 7:8, "Adonai will give it into the hand of the king", 1 Ki 22:6 or "Adonai is my soul's sustainer, Ps 54:4, see also 2 Ki 7:6, Ps 2:4, Ps 37:13, etc.)
• acting on Adonai, such as "reproaching Adonai" (2 Ki 19:23, Is 37:24), "remembering Adonai" (Neh 4:14) or "fearing Adonai" (Job 28:28). 
• ...

Thanks for reading! Come back soon to see why I was mistaken about Adonai going into the Greek, and why Pietersma seems to have been on the right track after all.

Related posts:

How does the Adonai cookie crumble?

Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord

"Euphemism": A Critical Response to Koog Hong

Some of the disagreement about origins of the divine Name translation laid out

Yahweh's STUFF!

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results
Is Jesus' Other Name "Yahweh" for the first-century church? Part 1: The Data
Why This Research Matters

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: results
Larry Perkins: paper review

"Euphemism": A Critical Response to Koog Hong

WE HAVE VERY quickly looked at some of the different issues around the Tetragrammaton in the Septuagint, with brief reference to John Wevers, Larry Perkins, Albert Pietersma, Martin Rösel, Larry Hurtado and Koog Hong, whose contribution I want to unpack with you now. Before I do that, however, I'm pleased to note that I did receive a response from Dr. Pietersma about my reservations with his conclusions on the Psalms. I will integrate his answer into my next post on "How the Adonai Cookie Crumbles", coming soon.

So Hong's paper, written for the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament in 2013 in 37.4 pp. 473-484 in Yonsei University, South Korea, treats the ineffability of God's name as a problem that found an early solution in the Hebrew Bible itself. Its title is The Euphemism for the Ineffable Name of God and Its Early Evidence in Chronicles and (wonderfully) is available for download via Hong's profile at academia.org here. What he does quite well here is to isolate very similar passages between Kings and Chronicles, and looks at how care over usage of God's Name may have affected its usage over the period of time separating the redaction of the two historical accounts. Here are the two most important statements from his abstract:

...the unique value of the double title אדני יהוה [Adonai Yahweh = "Lord LORD"] is established in tracing the euphemism in question, and the replacement of אדני יהוה of 2 Samuel with יהוה אלהים [Yahweh Elohim = "LORD God"] in Chronicles is presented as early evidence of the euphemism. Thus the reading Adonai for the Tetragrammaton appears to have begun considerably earlier than is commonly thought.

 p. 473

So put in simpler terms, Hong is saying that the Israelites were happy describing their God with a double title of Adonai Yahweh and at a later stage, when integrating the exact same story of David wanting to build God a temple, the double title had to go. What I never come to terms with in this paper is how Hong reconciles his belief that Adonai had become this great euphemism for the Sacredness of Yahweh, when in fact the narrow selection of examples that he points to seems to suggest, on his logic, the opposite direction of thought. 

Here's my difficulty: Later in the paper, Hong lays out all the passages he wants to compare for "the" euphemism, and actually 4 of the 7 comparable passages he examines simply contract the title Adonai-Yahweh into Yahweh. Only on two occasions, in 1 Chronicles 17:16-17, do you get the new appendage of Elohim that he just mentioned in the Abstract, and in the very same verse (1 Chronicles 17:17) you also get a contraction into Elohim. In summary, Hong's language of "the" euphemism implies a single solution to the ineffability and sacredness of the Divine Name while his key passage points to multiple acceptable practices, and they all involve ditching Adonai! If it is Yahweh that you want to exclude, why would the Chronicler ditch Adonai? 

The paper wants to set the context for its discovery of the early euphemism mentioned above in the debate around the Greek translation of kyrios ("LORD") for Yahweh. Kyrios, as you probably know by now if you read this blog, is what we know was used by Greek-speaking Jews (and Christians) very early on for "Yahweh", and like Yahweh, it was treated as a name. It was treated as a proper name in that it rarely held the definite article that we systematically smack on to the front, the LORD. I don't think Hong notes this or its significance to the discussion. What he does do is point to early sensitivities or preferences around God's name being significant enough to affect a diaspora community's history books. 

One question that we should check, given even the diversity of expression in the microcosm of Hong's passage: what is the Chronicler's usage of Adonai generally? Here, the other research we are currently unpacking on this blog is of some help to us. If we refer to Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord,  we can see that Hong is correct, the Chronicler "avoids" using Adonai completely, despite its 38,013 Hebrew words. 

That sounds impressive (see Hong's emphasis p. 482, "...[Adonai Yahweh] is never retained in Chronicles", emphasis original), but set in the wider context of the Yahweh and Adonai concentrations of the Hebrew Bible, it's not so impressive and points more generally, in my view, simply to an early limited use of Adonai. Look, Genesis and Exodus use it a tiny handful of times, Leviticus doesn't, Numbers has a single occurrence... none of this evidence is used to point to Adonai as a euphemism, sorry the euphemism for Yahweh. So what about Samuel? Oh dear - only 2 Samuel 7 contains Adonai - in all of its 38,003 words it mentions Adonai in just six verses ! It seems there would have been plenty of other opportunities of story overlap between Samuel and Chronicles to implement this apparent practice, but nope, just here. It seems pretty conspicuous to me and could quite conceivably be the work of a redactional revision of Samuel (Hong simply states his strange assumption, p. 474 "the Chronicler's replacement of Samuel's אדני יהוה with יהוה אלהים is presented as early evidence of the use of Adonai as a surrogate for the Tetragrammaton"). Indeed, redactor revision in the opposite direction would seem to work more in step with the chronology required by both Hong's logic and evidence.

Really interestingly, Hong notes Jewish sources from the first and second century B.C.E. that seem to affirm hesitation and replacement between the two names, Adonai and Yahweh (pp. 474-5), although it seems to be in the direction Yahweh -> Adonai, not Adonai - > Yahweh.

Another great contribution by Hong is the summary of the early textual evidence around the Greek translation of these two terms, that does not point favourably to "Kyrios" being in the original Old Greek Alexandrian translation, although as already stated, that is a point of controversy, and I am myself far from convinced. More importantly, several scholars, including Albert Pietersma, Larry Perkins and Martin Rösel are also on the sceptical side of this fence, despite Hong's remarks about what "specialists now tend to see" (p. 477).

The next contribution made by Hong (and I promise to summarise the contributions and problems at the end), is that we must understand there was a difference between written and spoken practices, namely that because of the spoken practices that may have replaced Yahweh with Adonai, that the double-occurrence in the text created redundancy in the Scripture read (p. 482).

We also learn something about the scriptural purpose of the Hebrew, Yahweh-Elohim, which is rarely to do with invocation (Hong, however, seems incorrect in his emphasis about Adonai-Yahweh as commonly used for invoking God - in Ezekiel, where it is most prominent, Adonai-Yahweh is about communicating God's words: "thus says the Lord GOD"). We can agree that the scribal and spoken practices and distinctions are probably what affected the changes between 2 Sam 7 and 1 Chron 17, even if that may have no bearing at all on the originality of the Greek translation for both words, Kyrios.

Final point of note, which does go in the direction of Hong's chronology, Hong notes that Targum Onkelos and Pseudo-Jonathan, this practice of Adonai -> Yahweh became systematic. Dating of this evidence, however, is late, especially in the case of Pseudo-Jonathan.

Let's summarise, with plenty to say on the positive for Hong's contribution:

• highlights an interesting discrepency between Samuel and Chronicles in Divine Name appellation
• introduces the notion of "euphemism" as a tool to understand the substitution mechanisms in place over the centuries
• usefully surveys the lack of earliest extant textual evidence for the written usage of kyrios
• highlights that there is strong evidence for a distinction between written and spoken practice of the Divine Name, 
• asserts the alleged purpose of Yahweh-Elohim is not usually invocational (I can check this out soon with the tool I am developing), 
• Some strands of Judaism later continued in the Adonai -> Yahweh direction.

Great!

What about the negatives?

• Insufficient connection with the controversy around the originality of the Greek kyrios translation,
• Unclear as to why an Adonai -> Yahweh euphemism would help clear up the issues created around the ineffability of the divine Name of Yahweh
• The narrow evidence provided in Chronicles fails to account for any other ancient practice in the direction Hong assumes and fails to integrate the overall concentration differences in the Hebrew Bible between Adonai and Yahweh, the latter dwarfing the former massively and Adonai being generally so very rare in the earlier compositional periods.

Some of the disagreement about origins of the divine Name translation laid out

It is important to ground any research in other research - and all this Divine Name stuff I've been doing has been inspired by a number of scholarly perspectives and articles, that have seeped into my own perspective over time. The downside is it's pretty complex at times and does not all agree, but hopefully we can draw out some of the fascination that is there too (not least because it affects how we understand early perspectives of Jesus' conferred lordship among first and second century Christian communities). Of course, I've already mentioned Larry Hurtado as being one of the key figures that alerted me to the question of the anarthrous rule (no article) in the Greek translation of the Divine Name, Yahweh. I've also referenced already the great LXX scholar, Albert Pietersma, whose comments about indifference on the part of the Septuagint translators between Yahweh and Adonai in Psalms have spurred me on recently to document the different ways in which Yahweh and Adonai are translated into Kyrios in Greek (I have just emailed Dr. Pietersma about the evidence I describe in my post from October 2016 "Why This Research Matters" - if I hear back from him, I'll be sure to fill you in).

John Wevers is also a massive name in this field - he's passed away now, but he was able to respond to the question of the decaying consistency of the Kyrios translation in Psalms with respect to the Pentateuch and some of the other historical Hebrew books (which I have yet to get to). See the Hurtado hyperlink above.

Another contributor to my thought process was Larry Perkin's whose paper, which I reviewed and whose third point about the originality of the anarthrous Kyrios solution to the unpronounceable Yahweh problem, registered on my radar as a fundamental question. If we could demonstrate that the anarthrous solution was most stringently applied in the Pentateuch, but still applied in the other books of the Septuagint canon to a lesser degree, then we could unearth some potentially very interesting information about the Tetragrammaton conundrum as it was rolled out over time and maybe even over geographical locations. For Perkins and Martin Rösel, (see “The Reading and Translation of the Divine Name in the Masoretic Tradition and the Greek Pentateuch,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31 (2007):  411-28), the translators came up with this directly (or Jewish religious authorities overseeing their Egypt-based translation). Emmanuel Tov, Koog Hong and others disagree, citing the lack of Greek Jewish papyri in support of the Kyrios solution. This problem is significant, and the Rosel camp that I think I belong to have yet to provide a satisfying solution to it, but the Pentateuch's perfection on the rule points to a much earlier placement than Tov and others suggest (he points to what has to be an impossible mechanical replacement of "iao", one of the extant early Greek options).

So with those few references in mind, we are ready to have a look at an interesting contribution by Koog Hong in my next post or two, who reasons in terms of Euphemism.

Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord

OF COURSE I am playing on words with my title here. Both "Yahweh" and "Adonai" are pointing to the same Israelite God. But how they are used is my subject of interest here. We started that in my previous post, How does the Adonai cookie crumble? It wasn't too hard to put some of my research into a graphical format, something I don't think I ever tried on this blog before, so here goes in the form of two helpful charts!

Comments

• Until we reach the Psalms, the Adonai data is extremely low: only 46 occurrences total, with an average of 2-3 occurrences per book up to that point.
• In terms of concentration, it's a similar story: only 0.01% of Hebrew words before Psalms are the word "Adonai"; that's an average of 1 word in every 10,000.
• Yahweh is going to be an altogether different story: Up to and including 2 Chronicles, Yahweh (a.k.a "the LORD") is mentioned 3,823 times, an average of over 270 occurrences per biblical book. For these first 14 books, that's an extraordinary average of 1 word in every 84 being "Yahweh".
• The smallest gaps in concentrations occur in Ezekiel, Lamentations and Amos, where Yahweh concentrations vary from triple to double the number of Adonai occurrences. After those three, and excluding the very low Lord-reference books like Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and Daniel, the gaps widen suddenly and on a great scale.
• Hopefully, these huge differences will help us realise that when examining the usages, the number one thing to bear in mind is sheer scale, which has a bearing on the comparison aspect of my divine Name research (it is only one aspect, fortunately): the data pool for the Pentateuch is even smaller: 18 Adonai-s against 1,838 Yahweh-s.
• That parameter is significant if, like some LXX scholars like Larry Perkins, we accept that the anarthrous rule was devised at the outset when only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were translated. 18 is also such a small number for such a large volume, that it might be possible to assert that there were no Adonai in the original Hebrew Pentateuch, these few additions. being added as copies and recensions succeeded the decaying originals, or "orthographs".
• The amount of data I will have available to analyse Adonai with regard to the Greek article will be small, and will require further control data. My research into the anarthrous rule on the Yahweh side has already led me to exclude certain Greek cases: vocative, dative and accusative because of either common necessity or non-necessity of Greek articles, even for names. Fortunately, nominative and genitive are among the most important cases and are those affected by the rule, but we can expect the pool to be made smaller still when analysing articles included with Kyrios as a translation for Adonai.
• Further control data could take the form of the most popular human character of the book and a title other than "Lord" used by the book (the most likely being king and god, possibly both if I can get round to it).
• With the appraisal in hand of how a proper name and a regular title are handled by the translator, we can deduce if Adonai was affected by the rule or not. A halfway position could be indicative of recensional activity (i.e. lesser articles than a title would be expected for the book, but still more articles than Yahweh in the nominative and genitive).

NB data slightly updated to integrate "Adoun" (Strongs H113) when used to refer to God, with a total of 4 such occurrences by my count (Ex 23:17, 34:23, Is 10:33 and Mal 3:1). 

Related posts:

Yahweh's STUFF!

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results
Is Jesus' Other Name "Yahweh" for the first-century church? Part 1: The Data
Why This Research Matters
Larry Perkins: paper review

How does the Adonai cookie crumble?

ADONAI SEEMS TO be as well known as a name for God among lay Christian believers as Yahweh. Both are used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to the Israelite deity, and are both typically translated into English by "Lord", although Yahweh often gets a capitalised treatment of course. Previous posts will explain more about this, but readers are probably aware that I am keen to disambiguate where possible and where intended.

I had planned to plunge readers into the fascinating depths of what I am calling "Yahweh's Stuff" (see Saturday's post), but it makes sense first of all to deal with:
- How was Adonai used by the Hebrews, and how was its use different to that of Yahweh?
- How effectively did the early Greek translators from 3rd century B.C.E. onwards deal with any distinctions or similarities they saw?

Let's take the first question first! Adonai was usually by the Hebrews as a familiar alternative but relatively infrequent reference to their god (and lord). The inflected Hebrew with the plural vowels (Adonai rather than Adoni) is a good guess based on tradition that contextual knowledge would have been sufficient for the Israelites or later Jewish communities to sometimes pronounce one and sometimes pronounce the other. Hang on, weren't they some of the earliest monotheists on Earth? Why the likely plural? It is used in order to magnify the greatness of their god. Thus, the singular form is reserved for earthly lords, thus reducing the number of references to God still further.

Yes, referenced under Strongs H136, while Adonai is used quite a bit, it's maybe much less than you might think if you account for the massive reliance on Ezekiel for its modest numbers: approx. 434 occurrences, of which Ezekiel accounts for half (214 occurrences)! Compare that to Elohim's approx. 2600 occurrences and Yahweh's (and Yah's) approximate 6900 occurrences, we're talking a minor player in the Hebrew parlance for their god. As the Greek translators would recognise, it was used as a title and possessively (e.g. "our Lord") in a way that Yahweh never was. The swathes of biblical data on Yahweh that could have suggested otherwise simply don't contradict this idea, thus reinforcing it.

We should also remember that the Hebrew was not written overnight and by a variety of authors with different Hebrew styles and preferences - as the Ezekiel example should make very clear. So while Ezekiel occupies the most extensive usage, we see that quite a few books never even mention Adonai: neither Leviticus nor Ruth nor 1 Samuel nor 1 nor 2 Chronicles nor Esther nor Proverbs nor Ecclesiastes nor Song of Songs nor Joel nor Jonah nor Nahum nor Haggai. Amos is actually the most Adonai-friendly literature, representing an even greater concentration than Ezekiel: 24 occurrences for a total of only 3027 words (1 occurrence every 126 words; Ezekiel is 1 every 140). But even the Hebrew Bible's most Adonai-friendly text, Amos, has a major preference for Yahweh (1 occurrence every 42 words).

The second question was How did the Greek translators deal with the distinctions? Firstly, as I have extensively stated, Adonai and Yahweh were drawn together when the Greek translators used Kyrios to translate both of them. Secondly, only Yahweh had the firm grammatical signature of the anarthrous rule: stripping away the definite article in a way that is fitting for a name more than a title. This is where I feel I have demonstrated contra NETS leading translator, Albert Pietersma, following my two key discoveries of comparing Yahweh and Adonai translations in the Psalms, the very translation for which Pietersma is directly responsible. This rule was made possible because of the pre-existing Hebrew fact that Yahweh could not be owned, like a title (our Yahweh, etc.). The anarthrous rule did not make Yahweh this way - it *preserved* Yahweh this way. 

The final thing this breakdown should prepare us for is that the Greek lexical units - Yahweh's stuff - are almost entirely avoided in the Adonai translation scenarios. Not quite completely, though as I will show.

That seems like quite a lot of information already for today's post (and it took a while to distil too), so I'll save the actual breakdown for a future post. I hope that both may serve as a useful breakdown and reference.

Related posts:

Yahweh's STUFF!

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results
Is Jesus' Other Name "Yahweh" for the first century church? Part 1: The Data
Why This Research Matters

Yahweh's STUFF!

It's been a "wee while" since I posted, but little by little, my private research into the "divine Name" in the Bible has been picking up some momentum. What is this Name? In the Old Testament, the Israelites made sharp distinctions between their god, Yahweh, and the gods of the surrounding nations with whom they were in regular dispute. One of the major distinctions was that Yahweh was not just a god or their god (although he certainly was that), he was a whole level above: god of gods! 


For Yahweh your god is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.                    Deuteronomy 10:17

These Israelites spoke Hebrew, and the name of the Israelite deity, Yahweh, was written and spoken in Hebrew (יְהוָ֣ה).

Like any being, divine or mortal, Yahweh had...stuff! 

What am I talking about? In the Hebrew bible, from a linguistic point of view, Yahweh owns: Yahweh's face, Yahweh's glory, Yahweh's house (or temple), Yahweh's hand, Yahweh's Angel, Yahweh's words, Yahweh's anger, Yahweh's love, his Spirit, and of course, a Name (... and still a lot more besides!) In addition to these "lexical units", there are some other units that I want to track, combining a few common prepositions like from Yahweh. But what am I tracking exactly?

A couple of years ago it came to my attention that something special happened between the Old Testament and New Testament regarding Yahweh's name, about which I hadn't the foggiest before that time. I already knew that the Hebrew bible (a somewhat loose canon) had been translated into Greek. I'm not sure if I realised that the reason behind this translation was that the Israelites had been invaded and deported into surrounding nations, where they progressively adopted the local language as their primary language, thus rendering their sacred scripture pretty incomprehensible to many. One very important such community of diaspora Israelites was located in Alexandria, Egypt. I'm certain I didn't know that initially, the translation was of the first five books only - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. That's still a very big translation project!

I was clueless that this translation bears some interesting hallmarks of theological understanding and religious practice and discourse, sometimes with clear influence of the Alexandrian context. So, for instance, there are Egyptian loan-words (like "reed" and "basket"), understanding of divine beings as angels had developed and was emphasised. By far my best and clearest scholar on influences on this translation (along with the other books comprising the Hebrew Bible translation into Greek), is Jan Joosten, a faculty member of the University of Oxford, who has over 80 peer-reviewed papers available on the academia.org website here, and the best of these on Egyptian influences is this one. Honestly, the guy's a linguistic genius, basically, and super interesting to read! Some of his conclusions may appear strong, however, and should be read from within a linguistic sepcialist's perspective, e.g. "Although the Greek version was derived from a Hebrew source, it is essentially a text distinct from the Hebrew Bible, with its very own historical, cultural and religious context." (The Library of Alexandria: A Cultural Crossroads of the Ancient World)

Anyway, one of the most interesting and conspicuous shifts was the diaspora Jews' super-exaltation of the name of Yahweh itself. From various sources, we learn that this name itself became as sacred as its referent, such that the translation in Leviticus 24:16 from Hebrew to Greek. This underwent the following modifications:

[A]nyone who blasphemes the name of Yahweh is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name they are to be put to death.

Septuagint Greek translation:

Whoever names the name of [the] Lord - by death let him be put to death; let the whole congregation of Israel stone him with stones. Whether a guest or a native, when he names the name, let him die.

Let's be honest and clear. The Jews could have transliterated Yahweh into Greek letters to reflect the precious name in the much-needed language of Alexandrian Greek. But the name was soooo precious, God's intervention soooo hoped for, and his potential extended offense and wrath waaaaay to dear a price to pay, that an alternative was sought. Someone came up with a novel idea: what about "Lord" (in Greek, Kyrios)? But, in order to make it clear who we are talking about here, and that this is indeed a name let's delete the article before "Lord", so it reads like a name? Great idea! And so it was implemented with considerable consistency across those initial five books we know today as the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy).

Consistency was necessary because in the Hebrew Bible, there were nearly 7,000 occurrences of this Name, but the choice is of infinite importance for those interested in Christian theology, since we know that Jesus is understood as Lord too - exalted and enthroned into divine lordship over heaven and Earth. That's my "hook", I think. I already demonstrated via my publication here, however, that current exponents of explicit deity ascription to Jesus by the first century Christian authors via this Septuagint novelty (Lord, minus the article) cannot be used among their arsenal.

My longer-term project is to potentially challenge the assumption by current leading specialists on the Septuagint (such as Albert Pietersma) that Yahweh did not receive a different treatment to another Hebrew word/title (Adonai) translated by the same Greek word Kyrios. It is also more generally to provide as yet unchartered data for the slippage of this special translation deletion of the article preceding "Lord" once we venture beyond the Pentateuch. I have published some examples of this here: Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results.

As I have proceeded, it occurred to me that there are certain lexical units that can affect things too. They might well provide a more robust preservation against this slippage in centuries between the two Testaments represented in the Christian Bible (300-0 BCE), and even help us in some of the more ambiguous usages of Kyrios in the New Testament. 

My basic thrust here is this: ambiguity, where not intended, should be avoided. I want to know what folk meant by Lord. I often do not not know what people mean by Lord today, especially in anglosaxon Christian communities, where a centuries-long tradition of accepting the KJV importation of the Septuagint's Lord, has been sustained via capitalisation (LORD).

Another spinoff piece of research is to map out how the divine Name is rendered by the various Bible societies translation teams in languages spoken and written today.

Related posts:

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results
Is Jesus' Other Name "Yahweh" for the first century church? Part 1: The Data
Why This Research Matters