The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1151 page)

Jehovah
.

Eng. vocalization of the four consonants that make up the
tetragrammaton
. It is erroneous, since it took the vowels of
adonai
(‘my lord’) which were inserted into printed or written texts to prevent any attempt to pronounce the name of God.

 
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A sect derived from Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916), emphasizing biblical literalism and the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus is not God but the son of God, the first of his creations. The fulfilment of the promise of God's kingdom will be inaugurated by the battle of
Armageddon
, an event which was predicted for 1914—hence the saying of Rutherford, Russell's successor, that ‘millions now living will never die’. 1914 is now interpreted as the establishment of the kingdom. Jehovah's Witnesses engage in persistent door-to-door proselytizing, endeavouring to sell
The Watchtower
, in which the movement's interpretation of world events is contained.

 
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(Chin., ‘benevolence’). A central virtue in the
Confucian
tradition, also commonly tr. as ‘humanity’, ‘human-heartedness’, ‘love’, ‘altruism’, etc. The Chinese character is formed by combining the elements ‘human’ and ‘two’, suggesting a reference to the quality of human relationships. In early Confucian texts, jen is employed in two senses:

(i) as the particular human virtue of benevolence or goodness which is embodied to some extent in all people (but perhaps especially in the nobility);
(ii) and more importantly, as the moral life ideally embodied

.
Confucius freed jen from the exclusive possession of the nobility, rendering it a moral quality that can be pursued as a goal by human beings regardless of their social position. As a general term, jen, for Confucius, embraces both
i
(‘righteousness’) and
li
(‘propriety’).
In the thought and teaching of
Mencius
, jen is made into one of the four cardinal virtues.
Other schools of thought quickly criticized the Confucian understanding of jen.
Mo Tzu
saw the Confucian jen as socially divisive because of what he took to be its partiality, and taught ‘universal love’ (
chien ai
, literally, ‘a love that does not make distinctions’) in its stead.
Taoists such as
Lao-Tzu
and
Chuang-Tzu
challenged the Confucian understanding of jen on the grounds that it was part of
wei
, the sort of contrived action they sought to avoid.
Nevertheless, chen-jen (real or perfect person) is admired as the one who bears all things with equanimity.
In later neo-Taoist texts (
hsüan-hsüeh
), jen refers to the universal extension of love, by which one forms mystically one body with Heaven and Earth.

 
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Jeremiah
.

Second of the major Hebrew
prophets
, after whom is named the prophetic book. Traditionally the Book of Lamentations is also ascribed to Jeremiah.

 
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Jewish
apocryphal
book. The date is uncertain (4th–2nd cent. BCE). It purports to be a letter of the
prophet
Jeremiah
to the Jewish
exiles
in Babylon.

 
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Jericho
(modern Tell esSultan)
.

Ancient city which (according to the account in Joshua 6) succumbed to the conquest of Joshua and the Israelites with a dramatic fall of the walls at the sound of the trumpets, and with a complete destruction.

 
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