Not as in “explain why they are!” but why the term Lord? “King of Kings” makes sense, but a Lord is generally still outranked by someone. Is there a particular reason why Lord seems to be the most used term (at least, in my experience)?
I specify Jesus/the Christian God because although i’ve seen other deities referred to as Lord (Vishnu, for example), i’m not sure whether that’s a Christian/Western perspective imprinted onto it. If not, same question really.
Lord is the person that you, personally, obey, no matter where either of you are on any heirarchy. I would assume that it is more obvious in older languages that My Lord is being addressed or spoken of. It’s not that He is A lord, but that he is My/Everyone’s/The LORD.
Also, once his name becamed deified and mysterious, you couldn’t use it unless you were deliberately calling down the lightning. So something else had to be used. Lord was chosen. (I think the original was something like Adonai.)
The English just seems to be a calque on the Latin, so for Western European languages you should probably be asking “why dominus?” The etymology of lord is interesting:
M.E. laverd, *loverd * (13c.), from O.E. *hlaford * “master of a household, ruler, superior,” also “God” (translating L. Dominus, though O.E. *drihten * was used more often), earlier hlafweard, lit. “one who guards the loaves,” from *hlaf * “bread, loaf” + *weard * “keeper, guardian, ward.” Cf. lady, and O.E. *hlafæta * “household servant,” lit. “loaf-eater.” Modern monosyllabic form emerged 14c.
from here. Note that other authorities derive “lady” from “loaf-kneader,” but “loaf” is central to both. I believe but am not sure that the Latin is based on domus, “house, home.”
IIRC, most uses of [small caps]LORD[/small caps] in the OT are actually there to represent the use of the ineffable name of G-d from the original texts, but I’m sure someone will be along shortly to correct me on that.
Edit: Okay, [small caps] isn’t the right tag, but you get the idea.
Interestingly, the standard “on your knees, palms together” praying posture is derived from a feudal rite of fealty between a vassel and his lord.
The Latin Vulgate, in use throughout Western Christianity from the 4th century to the 16th, almost always uses Dominus in conjunction with Deus — The Lord God. For example, Genesis 2:4,
Istæ sunt generationes cæli et terræ, quando creata sunt, in die quo fecit Dominus Deus cælum et terram…
These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens…
Revelation 1:8,
Ego sum alpha et omega, principium et finis, dicit Dominus Deus: qui est, et qui erat, et qui venturus est, omnipotens.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m guessing that when Jerome translated the Latin Vulgate in the 4th century, he was cognizant of the fact that Europe was still transitioning from polytheism to monotheism, and that the term “Lord God” would emphasize that the otherwise generically nameless Deus was the god, the one and only ruling god.
To answer the specific question, why did Jerome use Dominus and not another: other words have more specific meanings. For example, a king (Rex) is one in a line of kings. Dominus is a more general word to indicate “ruler” that doesn’t suggest politics or mortality.
In the New International Version, you are indeed correct, while “Lord” is used to translate the Hebrew Adonai - see their notes on the translation techniques used
I forget where I read it but I understood the forms of address in the Bible relected those of Constantine’s court in Constantinople. Trouble is, being no sort of expert, I have no idea how Constantine was addressed by his courtiers - presumably it was the Greek equivalen of Dominus.
Thanks all.
grimpixie is pretty close on the Hebrew; the root word in Hebrew, adon, translates best as “master,” of which a synonym is “lord” in the feudal sense.
An underlying issue is that the Tetragrammaton has been considered since the days of the Second Temple (ca. 516 BCE - 70 CE), and possibly as far back as some point during the First Temple period (~1000 BCE - 586 BCE) as so sacred that it could be spoken with its proper vowels only by the High Priest, only on Yom Kippur, and only during the three high confessionals. The issue is that the true vowels in the Divine Name have been lost to history.
The Greek word translated as “Lord” throughout the New Testament is kurios, which means a person “having power or authority” over another. It was used in reference to slave owners, kings and deities. Liddell and Scott say that it carried a connotation of having the “power of life or death” over another. I think it denotes more power than just a boss or a feudal lord and gets to something more akin to ownership and absolute authority over the fate of others.
Jesus is a Lord because it would be too imbalanced to field Him in a less than 2000-point army.
Yeah, because if you’re going to war and you have to bring hippies, you’ll want to make them as small a percentage of the budget as possible.
Lord is “person in authority, master over others”; the specialized use in Britain where it specifically references a peer (and usually a baron, the lowest rank of peer, at that) postdates the common traditional English Bibles (KJV and its predecessors). The King was “our Sovereign Lord” and the peerage were the Lords through whom he delegated his government.
Adon- and its variants were, as Ben notes, the Hebrew for “Lord and Master” – but a traditional usage also contributed strongly. The avoidance of speaking the Ineffable Four-Letter Name in Israelite/Jewish piety was accomplished by, whenever YHWH appeared, instead reading it as Adonai, more or less “Our Lord.” Kyrios (the Y being the traditional transliteration for the Upsilon which Diogenes rendered -u-) took on the same function in Greek, it being the generic “Lord” usage. One’s kyrios might be a basileos, a tyrannos, or several other species of quasi-monarch (or dyarch, as in Sparta) but he was the lord whom one obeyed.
KJV usage preserves the YHWH/Lord equivalence by rendering YHWH as LORD with small caps, while Adonai and similar forms were Lord in normal typography; YHWH Elohim or YHWH Adonia were rendered “Lord God.”
The key to the usage is the significance to Judaism (and later to Christianity) of God as the One Lord as distinct from the (false) gods of the Gentiles. For Christianity to insist that “Jesus is Lord” is not only an assertion of His authority but an implicit vaunt that Jesus is God, or a Person of God, that He is Himself theos and not merely a pointer-to-God. Though it took Greek philosophy and 300 years of theology before the Trinity got defined, the seeds are present in Paul’s letters and the Gospels, insisting on Jesus’s Lordship – whatever they ended up defining Him as, it would have to be either God or co-ranking with Him. Add in the Jewish-derived insistence on God’s Oneness, and you get Trinitarian theology in a nutshell from “Jesus is Lord.”