This paper analyses the way the name of the Supreme God of Israel and the names of pagan gods are used in Turkish versions of the Old Testament. The role of this semantic group in the canonical text is highly important in the context of biblical translation strategies. The paper pays particular attention to the principal names of God in the Old Testament: the Tetragrammaton YHWH – the proper name of the God Most-High, which is forbidden to pronounce, and ’elohim – the name based on the old Semitic root meaning ‘deity’, as well as to the name ’adonay [‘the Lord’]. The latter is used per se as one of the principal names of the Supreme God, as well as the reading of the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton according to the principles of «Qere – Ketiv» (“read” and “written” in Aramaic) that reflect the existence of two parallel versions of the canonical text of the Biblia Hebraica, oral and written. The combinations of different names are also examined with the focus on the names ’elohim and ’adonay as combined with the unpronounceable YHWH. 

The data presented in the article demonstrate considerable differences in the strategies of rendering the names of God in different Turkish versions of the Old Testament. Thus, we examine the correlation of the principal names of God – Arabic Allah and Turkic Tanri, as well as the means to denote the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, including the cases of the usage of the name Yehova, the late phantom reading of YHWH formed by the insertion of the vocalization of the name ’adonay into the consonantal Tetragrammaton.

Statistical analysis of distribution of the names of God in Turkish proverbs as well as some examples of such proverbs are presented to illustrate the typological panorama for this semantic group in Turkish, where pragmatic and psycholinguistic aspects of divine names are primarily determined by the role of Islam and Arabic as the language of the Koran in Turkish society.