Most English Bibles print “the LORD” in small capitals wherever the Hebrew text has the four-letter name of God, YHWH, and print “Lord” in ordinary type where the Hebrew has Adonai, a title meaning “my Lord”. The small capitals are a typographical signal: the word on the page is standing in for a name that is not being printed. The practice goes back through the King James Version to the Greek Septuagint, which rendered the name as Kyrios, “Lord”, following the Jewish custom of reading Adonai aloud in place of the name. The convention is respectful, and once understood it is easy to read. It has two costs: readers who do not know the code miss the fact that a personal name is present, and verses that turn on the name lose some of their force. The American Standard Version of 1901 broke with the convention and printed “Jehovah” throughout; almost every English version since has returned to LORD.
Three words that look alike on the page
An English Bible that follows the convention uses three forms for what are, in Hebrew, three different words.
LORD (small capitals) represents YHWH, the personal name of God, which the ASV prints as Jehovah.
Lord (ordinary capitals) represents Adonai, a title meaning “my Lord” or “Master”, which can also be used of human masters.
GOD (small capitals) represents YHWH when it stands next to Adonai in the Hebrew, so that the phrase Adonai YHWH is printed “Lord GOD” rather than the awkward “Lord LORD”.
Psalm 110:1 shows the first two at once, and shows why the difference matters. The verse is quoted by Jesus in the Gospels and is the Old Testament verse most often cited in the New Testament.
A Psalm of David. The LORD said to my Lord: “Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.”
— Psalm 110:1 (BSB)
The first “LORD” is the name; the second “Lord” is the title. David hears Jehovah speak to David’s own Lord, the Messiah. In the ASV the two words are visibly distinct:
A Psalm of David. Jehovah saith unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, Until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
— Psalm 110:1 (ASV)
The third form appears whenever the name follows the title, as in Abram’s prayer in Genesis 15, which the ASV renders “O Lord Jehovah” and the BSB renders with the small-capital GOD:
And Abram said, O Lord Jehovah, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and he that shall be possessor of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?
— Genesis 15:2 (ASV)
Where the convention came from
The chain runs back a long way. In the centuries before Christ, Jewish readers had ceased to pronounce the name and said Adonai in its place. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek at Alexandria, the translators generally wrote Kyrios, “Lord”, wherever the name stood, though some early Greek manuscripts wrote the Hebrew letters themselves or a Greek transliteration. The apostles used that Greek Bible, and the New Testament follows its practice; when Paul quotes a verse about the name of Jehovah, he writes “the name of the Lord”. The Latin Vulgate wrote Dominus. When English translators came to the Hebrew, they inherited “Lord” from a thousand years of usage, and the King James translators added the small capitals so that the careful reader could tell the name from the title. Their preface makes clear that they were aware of the name and chose the substitute deliberately, keeping the Hebrew form in seven places where the name itself was the point (see The seven places where the King James Version prints Jehovah).
What the convention preserves
The convention is not an evasion. It preserves three things. It keeps faith with the way the text was read in the synagogue in the time of Christ, and with the way the apostles quoted it. It avoids committing the translation to a pronunciation that cannot be proved, whether “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”. And it lets the English reader hear, in “Lord”, the title that the New Testament gives to Jesus: when Thomas says “My Lord and my God”, and when Paul says that every tongue will confess Jesus Christ is Lord, the word Kyrios is the word the Greek Bible used for the name. The convention quietly makes that connection audible.
What the convention costs
It also costs something. A reader who does not know the code reads “the LORD” as a title and never learns that God has a name. Verses that speak of the name itself become strange: “the LORD is his name” reads oddly when LORD is not, in fact, a name. And the Shema, Israel’s daily confession, loses its shape:
Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah:
— Deuteronomy 6:4 (ASV)
In a LORD-convention Bible that sentence becomes “the LORD our God, the LORD is one”, which is true but flattens a personal name into a title. The American revisers of 1901 felt this cost keenly and decided that a custom of the synagogue should not govern an English translation; their reasoning is described in the entry on the American Standard Version. Their choice was widely respected and almost universally not followed.
How to read a LORD-convention Bible well
A few habits make the convention transparent.
- Whenever you see LORD in small capitals, read it as the name, and if it helps, say the name silently in the form you prefer.
- Notice where the small capitals stop. “Lord” in ordinary type, and “my Lord”, are the title Adonai.
- Watch for GOD in small capitals; it marks the name in the phrase “Lord GOD”.
- Remember that “the name of the LORD” in the Old Testament and “the name of the Lord” in the New are the same phrase, with the same weight.
Read this way, a LORD-convention Bible loses nothing except the sound, and a reader who knows Exodus 3:15 will supply the sense.
Where Christians differ
Christians differ over whether English Bibles should print the name. Those in favour argue that the Hebrew text has a name and a translation should show it, as the ASV did. Those against argue that the apostolic practice of the Septuagint and the New Testament, which used Kyrios, is itself a warrant for the convention, and that printing a reconstructed pronunciation adds a claim the text does not make. Both positions are held by careful and orthodox readers. This site prefers to see the name printed, and says so, but it treats the small-capital convention as a reverent and reasonable choice rather than a fault.
For reflection
Open the psalm you know best and count the small-capital LORDs. Each one is the name God gave at the bush, the name he called his memorial to all generations. Then read the psalm again as an address to that God, and let the title become a name in your prayer. The best place to learn this habit is among other Christians who read the Scriptures aloud together and who call upon the name of the Lord.
References
- The Preface (“The Translators to the Reader”) of the King James Version (1611).
- The Preface to the American Standard Version (1901).
- The Septuagint.
- The Vulgate.
- Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906).
Lexicon answers from the Bible and public-domain reference works. It is a study aid and is not affiliated with any organisation.