“Should James Be Jacob?” & Other Questions About Hebrew Transliterations

What do the following people have in common?

• Jean-Luc Picard
• Yahya Sinwar
• Don Giovanni
• Jannik Sinner
• Ivan the Terrible
• The Jonas Brothers
• Evan Wyant from middle school

Answer? They all have the same name.

Look again. They all bear variations of the Hebrew name יוֹחָנָן‎ (yochanan)—in English, our common “John.”

Multiple times in my life, I have suddenly realized that a foreign name with which I was familiar was actually just their version of John. Yochanan in Hebrew ultimately became Juan in Spanish, Ian in Scottish, and João in Portuguese.¹

To make matters more complicated and therefore more fun, some versions of John became so common in given places that they spilled over into nearby languages thatalready had their own version of John. Shane is an Anglicized version of the Irish Sean, which is their version of John.²

In the original Hebrew, yochanan meant “God has been gracious.” The name of the female character Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is still baked into the Hebrew name for John. You just tack a version of Yahweh on the front of Hannah, and you get John (not so incidentally, that stray H in there, a letter we don’t pronounce, is left over from the Hebrew like a vestigial organ).

The closest any modern language gets to yochanan is German—presumably following an earlier Latin form—with its Johannes. It is from this form that Hans is derived.³

Should James be Jacob?

This linguistic situation is utterly fascinating to me.

And totally unacceptable to a lot of people. I don’t mean they refuse to call people John or any of its equivalents. No, they don’t know or care about John. He can take a hike from Lithuania to Wales, for all they care.

What gets their linguistic dander up is James. They say—they insist—that James should be Jacob. This is because (and this is true) the English name James began its life as the Hebrew word יַעֲקֹב (yaaqov), what we know as Jacob. This name is introduced to us as some kind of pun in Genesis 25:26. Jacob was named after the “heel” (Hebrew עָקֵב) of Esau that he grabbed onto on his way into this world. To call James “James” is to obscure his all-important connection to the patriarch, many now say.

The English name “James” began its life as the Hebrew word יַעֲקֹב (yaaqov), what we know as Jacob.

In my experience, most of those pushing for the book of James to be the book of Jacob in our New Testaments are not careful to articulate a consistent rationale for their preference for Hebrew forms over English ones. These folks are also often shrill, I must say, and conspiratorial.

But I did find one biblical scholar who argued that using James obscures a connection between the Old and New Testaments and diminishes the Jewishness of the latter. Those seem to me arguments worth considering.

I have buried the lede under multiple languages here, but I’ve done it for a good purpose. I’m trying to get past some pretty watchful dragons. I’m trying to make a point I don’t see anyone else making. It’s this: Pushing the way Christians talk and write back towards Hebrew is as linguistically impossible as it is theologically undesirable.

Linguistically impossible

You simply cannot be consistent with retrieving Hebrew sounds and forms, for several reasons.

1. You will fail

One is that you’ll never get it right. Your ancient Hebrew accent is horrible, you American. And our knowledge of how ancient Hebrew was pronounced is fragmentary. Surely there were regional dialects in which their version of Jacob was pronounced at least a little differently. (Today, John sounds a bit different depending on whether it is spoken in Michigan, Minnesota, or Manchester.) And don’t forget the Old Testament story in which dialectal variation led to the death of forty-two thousand Ephraimites (Judg 12:1–7)—and to our English word shibboleth, which we (ironically!) have our own way of pronouncing!

2. You will not satisfy the ones who care

Another reason is that you’ll never translate/transliterate often enough to satisfy some people. What is the logical end of insisting that James is really Jacob, that Jesus is really Yeshua, that the LORD is really Yahweh, that peace is really shalom, that Sabbath is really Shabbat, that slander is really lashon hara? It’s just going all the way and speaking biblical Hebrew instead of English. But if we’re allowed to say any religious words in good auld English, why not all of them?

James is the product of exactly the kind of linguistic evolution we see with John. Language changes over time, and in the mealy mouths of the medieval French, the -cob- in the middle of Latin Iacobus ended up becoming the letter M.⁴ Then the French conquered England (which this Anglophile would rather not talk about), and now we English speakers say, “James.” A combination of human physiology and historical contingency gave us the linguistic situation we have—just like it did with literally all of our words and all of our grammar. Nobody speaks proto-Indo European anymore.

Admittedly, the patriarch Jacob is still “Jacob” in English, not “James”—but this, too, is just the way the baguette crumbles. Spanish, too, has multiple versions of this name: from Iago (and Santiago, “Saint James”) to Diego to Jaime and Jacobo. Going around telling native speakers U R SAYING IT WRONG is generally not considered polite. A footnote and an occasional preaching point may be all we need.

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3. You won’t promote biblical understanding or unity

And efforts to move wholesale from “James” to “Jacob” won’t be effective, or so I believe.⁵ You’ll get a tiny tribe of people to agree with you, and to start a thousand unnecessary fights online with other bemused or bewildered Christians. A certain cast of mind loves to find out hidden truths others don’t know, especially if shady, malign forces can be blamed (antisemitism! Tradition!) for the truths’ hiddenness. But you won’t alter the course of the massive USS English Language, let alone the HMS and Kenyan and Australian versions of the same basic ship.

The New Testament authors had the definitive chance to show the Greeks the right way to pronounce the true names of God, or of Jesus, or of James.⁶ Instead, the NT writers used the forms available to them in Koine Greek, and they incorporated the natural sound changes that have ultimately put a -zuh- and not a -shwuh- in the middle of the English name of Jesus. Standard Koine Greek didn’t have a zh- or sh- letter like Hebrew, so it used its closest equivalent, basically our letter S. This is what all languages do: They Anglicize, Gallicize, Russianize, Turkify, Urdunate.⁷ And somehow, people from all these nations manage to worship the one true God, and his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. They’re not all saying it wrong.

A few months ago, I got one intelligent answer to my basic argument here: “Well,” said a YouTube commenter, “The New Testament authors were constrained by their audience, which expected forms akin to that of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.”

Here’s my reply: This attributes complex motives to the New Testament authors that we cannot verify. And aren’t we in a similar situation? “Jesus” is very well established in contemporary English. “James” is, too. As is “the LORD” and “Sabbath” and countless other standard transliterations/translations of Hebrew words. Why can’t we do what the NT authors did and use the language around us as it currently stands?

Theologically undesirable

I hate antisemitism, I do. My wife is part Jewish. Recovering the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul—and the neat connection between James the New Testament writer and Jacob the patriarch—is a good thing and not a bad thing. But I don’t think making people talk differently is the way to execute this recovery. I think insisting on replacing English words/names with Hebrew ones actually cheapens that effort by reaching for a theologically undesirable expedient.

Many Christians have tried to baptize or sacralize a particular language as the truly righteous or divine one, the tongue of Adam or of angels. This appears to be a natural human tendency. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English have all been candidates over the centuries. Literally yesterday, someone insisted to me that God inspired the Elizabethan English of the King James Bible because he knew that English would become the lingua franca of the modern world. But the mere fact that our term for “widely used interlanguage” once meant “language of the French”⁸ ought to remind us that languages rise and fall with the empires to which they’re attached. Latin had a huge influence because the Roman empire was so powerful—but even Rome did not remain top canus. God doesn’t have a favorite language. He didn’t pick one to be the one tongue to rule them all.

One of the reasons God chose Abraham in the first place was so that he might bless “all the families of the earth” (Gen 12:3). If he has a favorite family, and for his own loving reasons he does (Deut 7:6–8), it’s the Jews. But even that fact doesn’t cause their language to be holy. The Lord didn’t chide the Jews for losing Hebrew as their daily language while they were exiles in Babylon. He didn’t ask Nehemiah or Ezra to re-establish Hebrew upon their return to the land. He didn’t inspire the New Testament writers to write Hebrew. The Bible is multilingual, and so is God. More than anyone else in the history of the universe.

The Bible is multilingual, and so is God. More than anyone else in the history of the universe.

God can speak your language. However you say James or Jesus or Jehovah in your language, keep on truckin’. God hears and understands.

I’m not tossing charges of racism around here: I’m not saying that defenders of Hebrew are philosemitic to some kind of ultranationalist degree. That’s not the feel I get. (I’ll say the same of defenders of Latin and Greek.) It’s a religious thing: It’s the impulse that led one old immigrant to argue that her Swedish Baptist church in the US should not move to English. She objected: “You never heard of anyone being converted in English!” Or maybe it’s the magical/superstitious view that to have the “real name” of something is to have some kind of control over or access to it.

I am not unwilling to learn a religious patois, if that’s what God demands. I am a native speaker of American evangelical Protestant lingo. But aside possibly from some technical terms like “church” and “elder,” which gain their meaning from the nexus of meaning created by Christ when he founded the church, God has not asked us to learn a special religious way of talking. And Tyndale’s plowboy lives at the center of my heart. If he comes into our assemblies and hears weirdo language, he’s going to think we’re crazy (1 Cor 14:23–25).

I admit that I wouldn’t complain too much if “Jacob” ultimately replaced “James.” That’s not the point for me. And I acknowledge that some amount of usage policing seems to be a natural part of the way humans interact with language. I’m doing it myself in this piece, even by defending the English status quo. But there is a fine line between advocating for a linguistic standard and engaging in ideological language engineering. I fear the latter—though from good-hearted people!—is driving the Hebraization campaign I see slowly growing in force online.

Take it from Teacher Marcus Meadow Guard Youth.

Related content

• How to Use Linguistics to Understand the Bible
• Original Language Research: What to Do, What Not to Do
• Pastor, Are You Making These Common Lexical Mistakes?
• What Are the Best Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicons? Your Ultimate Guide
• Why Was “Saul” Changed to “Paul”?

Mark Ward’s suggested resources for further study

1. Yayha is Arabic; Giovanni, Italian; Jannik, Germanic; Ivan, Russian; Jonas, Lithuanian; Evan, Welsh.
2. One of the coolest things about English is that the same French words entered it twice, at different times, and in different forms. Vanguard and avant-garde provide an example. My own surname, Ward, also came into English as “guard.”
3. And because pixels cost nothing compared to ink, I will add that Hansel, the little boy who killed the witch in the Grimm’s fairy tale, is a diminutive version of Hans. The -el on the end is kind of like our -y: as Jim becomes Jimmy, Hans becomes “Hansy.”
4. If this sounds impossible to you, listen to yourself pronounce “Israel.” You likely switch the vowel sounds around. Now imagine that spelling ended up following pronunciation, as it often does. Suddenly you get “Isreal”—and “James.”
5. Mark Wilson suggests that if Bombay, Peking, Burma, and Rhodesia can become Mumbai, Beijing, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, then “James” can become “Jacob.” I can’t deny that this is possible.
6. Greek ιακωβος already includes multiple sound changes away from the Hebrew original, even if it is closer to it than “James.”
7. This is not a word.
8. It’s a little more complicated than that: It was once a literal trade pidgin in the Mediterranean that included elements of multiple languages, though not French!