INDY500 said:
At the same time, the divine name was increasingly regarded as too sacred to be uttered; it was thus replaced vocally in the synagogue ritual by the Hebrew word Adonai ("My Lord"), which was translated as Kyrios ("Lord") in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament.
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I hadn't thought about the genesis of the word myself in some time. In defense of Ormus, the Latin word for lord "Dominus" also appears very early, around the 4th century.
You do bring up an interesting point that I'd like to make. Since the literal English word, "Lord," did not exist prior to the existence of the Germanic tribes, then older concepts like "Adonai" and "Kyrios" cannot literally mean "Lord." However, as is the case with ancient literature, if a word refers to an archaic concept, translators will look for a modern equivalent--and that, I believe, is where the word "Lord" comes in. The actual original Biblical texts literally say "YHWH" or "Adonai" where "Lord" is translated in the Bible.
In the end, I want to say that I'm mainly arguing a linguistic point here. If people are comfortable with "YHWH" or "Adonai" being translated as "Lord," that's fine. On the other hand, I'm questioning whether it's an appropriate translation, whereupon you could say "God" instead. I want to say that I'm making these arguments with no "political correctness" intended. I'm just quite interested in linguistics and I believe in the importance of translating ancient texts, including the Bible, as accurately as possible.
Oh and, just to note, "Dominus" kind of illustrates my point about the difficulty of translating ancient concepts. "Dominus," in Latin, refers to a "master" or "owner," but was later translated in French as "sieur," which was later rendered in English as "sir." "Dominus" was also equivalent to the Greek title, "Tyrannos," which is where the English word, "Tyrant," came from. Chances are, both "Adonai" and "Kyrios" meant none of these things to the ancient people of Israel and Greece.