When Martin Handford created the character we all know and love to find hiding in a mess of funny situations his name was Wally. But if you grew up in the USA looking for this loony character amid all the surrounding shenanigans, you would have been looking for someone called Waldo not Wally. 

Why? 

Wally was changed to Waldo as a marketing strategy as Waldo was thought to be more appealing to an American audience. 

Walter in Germany. Holger in Denmark. Charlie in France.

Depending on what country one was in when looking for him they would grow up knowing the spacey guy as something different from everyone else and something different from who he was when written. 

Hetti. Hugo. Gile. Effy. Ali. Jura. Ubaldo. 

Wally was distinctive. Red and white hat with the red pompom, big googley-eye glasses, a red and white barrel stripe shirt, blue pants, brown shoes and a brown cane. 

But always there were decoys, weren’t there?

The same glasses on a different person. Inverted colors on the clothes. Stripes running vertically on a shirt. Someone else with a cane. So many people and things drawn in to draw our eyes away from finding Wally…or was it Waldo? 

Does it really matter? 

It definitely does matter since the publishers felt the need to alter Walter (or was it Wally?) for every different country. If they didn’t think it mattered, they’d have simply transliterated Wally into every language of publication. 

But why does it matter?

Because people don’t buy what they can’t relate to. Or rather they are more inclined to purchase what they find more appealing.

And people always naturally find their own cultural norms more appealing. 

While this will give us a wrong idea of Wally as Waldo, it doesn’t make too big of a difference in our daily life or our over all existence whether this character is Wally or Waldo or Charlie or Hugo…

What does matter however is that this method is exactly the same as that employed to give us the Scriptures and especially the knowledge of our Creator. 

The Heavenly Father called Himself “Elohim” when He spoke to Moses and Abraham and all the prophets of old. But that title isn’t appealing beyond the borders of Israel. 

And translating it or transliterating it was not attractive to the masses either. 

So what did Christian tradition do? It did what was later done with Wally to make him Waldo or Holger or Charlie. Christian custom reached into local lingo and adopted familiar terminology. Then labeled that local term a “translation”….but was it a translation? No. It was just an adoption. An appellation more appealing than a more accurate rendering of the foreign and faithful concept of “Elohim”. 

So in English speaking cultures and various Germanic and Nordic languages “Elohim” was replaced with “God” or “Gott”, with “Gud” or “Guð.” In more Latin based languages “Elohim” was replaced with “Deus” and “Dios” with “Deu” and “Dio.”

Elsewhere instead of Elohim or a translation or transliteration of Elohim the marketing strategy for Bible versions gave them Bog, Zot, Tata, Ma, Allah, Nyame, Jainkoa, Mulungu, Mawu, Jumala, Katonda, Ñandejára, Bondye, Akua, Vajtswv, Isten, Chi, Tuhan, Dhia, Pengeran, Imana, Xwede, and many many more. 

“Oh but they are just translations…it’s no big deal.” Say the people whose job it is to check the translators and make sure they did their job, properly and without chicanery…but yet never do their job of checking. 

They simply see the differences and say, “It’s the same thing.” 

As for our English versions we can easily check the translators. But we have to be willing to ask the hard questions. The questions themselves are easy but they are hard to ask because cultural norms don’t allow for the inquiry. 

“If ‘Elohim’ means ‘God,’ then what does ‘God’ mean?”

A very simply question but we are expected to never ask it. Just say it means Elohim and keep it moving. 

But “Elohim” means “Mighty one, majesty, force, power.” That means that the word “God” needs to mean something along those lines or trace to something along those lines.

“God” is an Anglo-Saxon transliteration of the German word “Gott”, with variants in Norse and Icelandic as Guð and Guþ. So the word “God” being a transliteration has no meaning at all in itself for good or ill. Like all transliterations it’s sound without significance. The attempt to use the phonetics of one language to replicate the sound of another language. 

But “God” comes from “Gott” which comes from nobody knows exactly where. 

The best guesses scholars have come up with are one of two possibilities from Porto-Indo-European - either “ghut” meaning “that which is invoked” or elsewise possibly “ghuto” meaning “poured, libation”.

There’s one other suggestion that “Gott” came from the Goths whose name was actually “Gutþiuda” or “people of Gut”. 

Whether “God” is originally derived from a name for the Goths or whether it descends from the PIE word for libation or the PIE word for invocation, or some otherwise unknown possibility, it most definitely doesn’t mean “mighty one, force, power, or majesty”. 

And “God” was not chosen as a word for the Creator because it was thought at the time to be a translation of Elohim. It was instead chosen at the time for Elohim because it was already the common term among the Anglo-Saxons for all the things they already worshipped. 

“God” found its way into the English Bible versions because John Wycliffe selected it for rendering the equally erroneous Greek and Latin terms “Theos” and “Deus”, which were selected in Greek and Latin for the same reasons as “God” was later chosen for Old English, because they were familiar to the people of those tongues already.

William Tyndale later followed Wycliffe in this folly without question rendering “God” in-place of “Elohim”.

Miles Coverdale finished Tyndale’s work and carried on the custom…which became British tradition…and that British tradition swept through the British empire. 

And so “God” became the unquestioned term to call the Heavenly Father, though it doesn’t mean Elohim and no one on earth can say what it actually does mean. 

Much like “Where’s Waldo”? We’ve been looking for God among a sea of similar images never really realizing what the author of the Book actually wrote was somebody called something totally different. 

Oh but it’s really the same character whether you call him Wally or Waldo or Charlie or Holger. It’s really the same person whether you call Him Elohim or God or Zot or Bog or Atua etc. 

Oh really?…and how would you know that without checking into it? 

How would you know that by just saying it’s the same thing and asking no questions about it? 

And if it’s the same thing why would they change it? 

If it’s the same thing why not let go of the familiar term you are used to and return to what was actually written down by the prophets of old by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit…not adopted by custom and the assumption of the scribes and church leaders. 

Look into these matters. Ask questions. Don’t just follow the crowd.  

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