Holy

 April 25, 2024 

I’ve been writing a devotional for my grandkids. I’ve been focusing on a single verse for a week or more. At the beginning of March, I started with the 23rd Psalm; I figure that it might be good to look deeply into familiar Scriptures that we might know from memory, and if not, would be able to begin memorizing just through the repetition. After a week on verse 1, I decided to pick up where we left off, and figured it might be helpful for others, so here we are! This week’s verse is from Psalm 23:1 “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” 

You probably already have this one memorized.  We’re going to look at it perhaps a bit differently than you may have done before. We’ll begin with the first two words, which is actually only one in the original. In the older translations, when “LORD” is all in capital letters, it is God’s proper name, consisting of four Hebrew letters, YHYH or YHVH. The Hebrew alphabet has no vowels, so pronunciation was assumed. But because God’s name was considered holy and they didn’t want to violate the second Commandment, they wouldn’t pronounce it. When speaking, they substituted the word for “lord” in its place, and eventually no one remembered how it was actually pronounced. We add the vowels to come up with Yahweh or Jehovah, but no one really knows. We’ll see more on that tomorrow, but for today, remember God’s name is holy, and if we are called by his name, we should be holy, too.