SACRED NAME BIBLES

Sacred Name Bibles emphatically use the Hebrew names of the Father and the Son, sometimes written in actual Hebrew letters but more often transliterated into various English forms. Sacred Name Bibles make up their own pronunciations of the "True Names" and insist that everyone should say it their way. We DO NOT recommend Sacred Name Bibles and are only including them here so we can debunk them, starting with the following videos exposing ten problems with Sacred Name everything. 

At first glance "The Scriptures" is an attractive Bible if you're wanting to get closer to the original. It features a literal pro-Torah translation, highlights our Hebrew roots, and claims to be Messianic. Many people like this version because it meets their need for a personal Bible they can carry around and read from every day - it's the whole Scriptures, looks and feels really nice, and is widely available in a variety of hard copy and digital formats. With all these things going for this version you may be surprised to hear that we emphatically do not recommend it. Even if you like The Scriptures, would you allow us to show you some of the serious problems and misinformation behind it and explain why, even though it may be the best of the Sacred Name Bibles, it's still awful? 

"The Scriptures" attempts to brings its readers closer to the original texts and context of the Bible. It also seeks to give its readers the pure Scriptures, without man's interruptions and interpretations. This makes it even more shocking that The Scriptures also deletes 116 verses from one book of the Bible, with no explanation given anywhere. These verses are in both the Massoretic Hebrew and Greek Septuagint texts. If this is the Bible Yeshua read shouldn't his disciples be allowed to read it too? Is it ok for the Institute for Scripture Research to arbitrarily take stuff out of the Word of God or should that be a dealbreaker? Does a translation of the Holy Scriptures with this many verses removed even deserve to be called "The Scriptures"? You need to see this for yourself.

One of the reasons "The Scriptures" has become popular is because it uses Hebrew words and names. The problem is that it transliterates them wrong, leaving its unsuspecting readers sounding lispy, congested, and infantile. Nobody wants to try using the new words they're learning only to be looked at funny or corrected. But even more importantly, if you don't learn Hebrew the way it's actually used by the Jewish people you also run the risk of destroying your credibility and witness. If somebody insisted on calling the 45th president "Donalth Thrump" would you take them seriously? Yet this is literally what The Scriptures is doing, teaching its readers to pronounce D and T with a TH sound - and that's not even the worst of it. Here's a heads up on the six ways The Scriptures teaches bad Hebrew.

The translators of "The Scriptures" are inconsistent and misleading with the Hebrew word "elohim". When it's the one true God they transliterate and capitalize it as "Elohim" but when it's other gods they just translate it as "mighty ones". They then try to make the case that our English word "God" comes from the ancient Hebrew "Gad" and claim that "God" is actually a dirty word having to do with pagan deities and sex. That's stupid. If Gad/God isn't ok why will it be written on one of the gates of the New Jerusalem? The Scriptures has some other translation issues we'll also address in this conversation but at the very least, let this truth set you free.

"Come Out Of Her My People" is published by the Institute for Scripture Research. This book teaches that the commandment to "not mention the names of other gods" is so literal that it's sinful to even say the names of pagan gods, never mind that you can't read the Bible out loud anymore. It goes to the extreme of trying to censor words like justice, grace, Bible, and Son of Man from the English language because they're supposedly pagan, even though the New Testament doesn't teach that. It also drags the English and Greek names of Jesus Christ and the Lord God through the mud, unphased by the fact that the Apostles were ok with the Septuagint. This is the dark and insane backdrop to "The Scriptures" Bible. If you've been caught by these lies please let the truth presented here set you free.

There are seven Hebrew/Aramaic New Testaments and all of them write the name of the Messiah as ישוע, pronounced "Yeshua". The Scriptures disregards this and writes his name as יהושע, or Yehoshua. These two spellings are pronounced the same in spoken Hebrew and both are used in reference to both Joshua and Jeshua the post-exilic High Priest but "The Scriptures" tries to make one spelling right and the other wrong, even going so far as to attack the name of Yeshua as not being the name above all names. To make matters worse, the ISR then miswrites Yehoshua as Yahushua because that's how the Assyrians, who had no "o" sound in their spoken or written language, wrote it. In this conversation we slowly and methodically dismantle the ISR's misinformation and junk scholarship on this topic and finish by encouraging you to learn your Hebrew from the Jewish people and not from ancient Nazis.

The Institute for Scripture Research makes very serious accusations against anyone not trying to use the Sacred Name. But what did Yeshua do? Let's look at the sources proving that he followed the Jewish tradition of saying "Adonai", addressed God as his "Abba Father" and taught his disciples to do the same. The simple truth is that our Messiah did not have a Sacred Name agenda.

Dear friend, this is the last of our seven conversations about The Scriptures. In this extremely thorough review the teachings of the ISR have been weighed in the balance of truth and found severely wanting. "The Scriptures" is the best of the Sacred Name Bibles but it's still a trojan horse full of bad fruit. Come away from the ISR and the Sacred Name movement, touch not the unclean thing, and let the truth set you free.

The Hebrew equivalent of "Alpha & Omega", "Aleph & Tav" is an unstranslateable Hebrew word that occurs throughout Tanach. While serving a grammatical purpose by pointing to the direct object in a sentence, "את" sometimes does have a deeper meaning, even pointing to Messiah - a fact which even the ancient sages acknowledged. The Messianic Aleph Tav Scriptures could be useful in bringing this forth. The problem is all the Sacred Name misinformation and weirdness mixed in - for instance calling God "the Yah-head" and calling the Messiah "Yahushua", a mispronunciation derived from the imperial Assyrians which we thoroughly dismantle in our review of "The Scriptures" above. Not to mention, these books are really expensive - well over $100 each. Why not save your money and just learn basic Hebrew so you can find all the Aleph-Tavs right there in the actual text for yourself?

Aramaic New Testament written in Hebrew letters on the right-hand page with an English translation on the left. The Aramaic version of the name of God "Maryah" is translated "Master YHWH", "Alaha" is "Elohim", and the aberrant spelling "Y'shua Mashiyach" is used for the Master, making this an ideal Sacred Name Bible. The AENT embodies the valuable scholarship of Andrew Gabriel Roth on the Peshitta NT. Unfortunately these insights are lost in the toxic Sacred Name ideology running through the footnotes and appended essays in this book which, it appears, were mostly penned by his co-producer. Between "10 Problems" and our critique of "The Scriptures" these Sacred Name delusions were already dealt with so we'll leave it at that. This book is out of print and mostly unavailable. We recommend Roth's books for the scholarship without the poison: 

This isn't the worst Sacred Name Bible but it still has serious problems. 1. It deceptively translates elohim in two ways, see review of The Scriptures above. 2. Are we the only ones who think it sounds presumptuous to call yourselves "Yahweh's Restoration Ministry"? 3. They literally get Messiah's name wrong. Instead of ישוע which is how every Hebrew NT writes it, they use the longer form יהושע (see review of The Scriptures for why this is wrong.) But then instead of "Yehoshua" which is how every Jewish person and scholar says it, they make up "Yahshua". The problem is that this is a different word with a different meaning: Yah+shua or יה+שוע. Shua/שׁוּעַ is Strong's #H7769; look it up in the back of this book and you'll see that it means "cries for help". Yahshua isn't a Hebrew name but it does have a Hebrew meaning: "Yah cries for help". This borders on blasphemous.

This book butchers both Hebrew and English in ways that are downright perverse. There is no good reason to write "s" as "c" in Amoc, Ecter, Cukkoth, Kiclev, Ciynai, etc. Disfiguring "Israel" as "Yashar'el" is a slap in every Jewish face. The claim that "the Hebrew word eth (את) means divine" is an unsubstantiated lie. And trying to twist Messiah's name to "Yahusha" is outrageous. "Joshua" (Strong's #H3091) is usually spelled "יְהוֺשֻׁעַ" but there are two places (Deuteronomy 3:21 and Judges 2:7) where the full spelling "יְהוֺשׁוּעַ" is used, making this twisted pronunciation impossible. Instead of repenting, the people behind the Eth-Cepher actually discredit the way the Bible spells this name by saying "we do not hold that this is accurate" and then claim that it's actually a different name with a different meaning. Just wow.

The "Besorah Of Yahusha Natsarim Version" outdoes even the Eth-Cepher in its perverse determination to mangle the Hebrew language beyond recognition in order to not have to say anything the Jewish way. How many of these seemingly drunk-texted Hebrew words can you recognize? Alahim, turah, ash/ashah, guyim, uyiqara, shabathuth. How about these incoherently misspelled Hebrew names? Yisharal, Kuah, Kam, Kanok, Farah, Lui, Muab, Mushah. Even the attempted use of "Natsarim" as "the correct term used for the original followers of Yahusha" is wrong. The Hebrew word for Nazarenes is "נֹצְרִים" and is pronounced "Notsrim", see Strong's #H5341. And most importantly, their mispronuncation of the Master's name as "Yahusha" is proven incorrect from the two times quoted above where the full spelling of "Joshua" as "יְהוֺשׁוּעַ" renders it impossible. Even more wow.

The author and editor of this work openly practices and teaches polygamy. Yet one more disgusting example of the unclean spirit behind the Sacred Name movement and the teachings and 'Bibles' it has spawned.

This is a plagiarized version of The Scriptures so much of what we said in our review of that version also applies here. The people behind this version are engaged in deceptive and even fraudulent criminal activities; see the evidence here. More red flags: their website claims it's "the superior and most anointed version so far" and "the only version done according to His law"; their Hebrew is garbage - "qodeshi" isn't a word; and they take paganoia to new heights of insanity, even cancelling "set apart" as pagan because of the Egyptian god "Set"!