Why do older King James Bibles contain the name of God as Jehovah only 4 times?

Answer 1

The name "Jehovah" is found 410 times in 360 verses in the Old Testament, starting with Genesis 5:22, ending with Zechariah 11:8.

The name, Jehovah, is not in the New Testament.

The translations containing Jehovah in the Old Testament translate what is called the tetragramaton, the 4-letter name, YHWH (using this alphabet). Given the cammandment to not take the Lord's name in vain, Jewish scholars reasoned that it was better not to speak it at all. They sometimes would instead say "He who lives eternally," or similar phrases to get the idea across without speaking YHWH. Additionally, they took the vowels from Adonai, one of God's names, and joined that with the consonants YHWH, getting YaHoWaiH, which is the origin of the word, Jehovah. Speaking "Jehovah" was speaking a name invented by humans, minimizing the opportunity to use God's actual name in vain.

Since YHWH is Hebrew, and the New Testament is written predominantly in Greek (with some Aramaic), the tetragramaton is not found within it, so the King James translators never translated "Jehovah" into the New Testament

The King James Version uses Jehovah at Ex.6:3, Ps.83:18, Is.12:2;26:4

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Another Comment

It is not true that the New Testament does not contain the personal name of God.

Among other reasons, one simple reason is that writers directly quoted God's name from the Old Testament. That the Old Testament liberally included the Tetragrammaton (The written character's of God's name, YHWH or Yahweh, or the modern English pronunciation, Jehovah), and so it is undeniably linked.

For example: Matthew 4:4

King James: But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

New World Translation: But in reply he said: "It is written, 'Man must live, not on bread alone, but on every utterance coming forth through Jehovah's mouth.'"

Deuteronomy 8:3 So he humbled you and let you go hungry and fed you with the manna, which neither you had known nor your fathers had known, in order to make you know that man does not live by bread alone but man lives by every expression from Jehovah's mouth.

Further reason:

Jerome, in the fourth century, wrote: "Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed." (Deviris inlustribus, chap. III) This Gospel includes 11 direct quotations of portions of the Hebrew Scriptures where the Tetragrammaton is found. There is no reason to believe that Matthew did not quote the passages as they were written in the Hebrew text from which he quoted.
Other inspired writers who contributed to the contents of the Christian Greek Scriptures quoted hundreds of passages from the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Many of these passages included the Hebrew Tetragrammaton right in the Greek text of early copies of theSeptuagint.In harmony with Jesus' own attitude regarding his Father's name, Jesus' disciples would have retained that name in those quotations.-Compare John 17:6, 26.
In Journal of Biblical Literature, George Howard of the University of Georgia wrote: "We know for a fact that Greek-speaking Jews continued to write יהוה within their Greek Scriptures. Moreover, it is most unlikely that early conservative Greek-speaking Jewish Christians varied from this practice. Although in secondary references to God they probably used the words [God] and [Lord], it would have been extremely unusual for them to have dismissed the Tetragram from the biblical text itself. . . . Since the Tetragram was still written in the copies of the Greek Bible which made up the Scriptures of the early church, it is reasonable to believe that the N[ew] T[estament] writers, when quoting from Scripture, preserved the Tetragram within the biblical text. . . . But when it was removed from the Greek O[ld] T[estament], it was also removed from the quotations of the O[ld] T[estament] in the N[ew] T[estament]. Thus somewhere around the beginning of the second century the use of surrogates [substitutes] must have crowded out the Tetragram in both Testaments."-Vol. 96, No. 1, March 1977, pp. 76, 77.