The modern Bible correctly records the words of God

Yay! That you for accepting! In regard to the Jonah verse, I agree that the Hebrew word for heart is Me-ay (Me-ah actually means 100 I think.) And Me-ay is definitely the word for "heart" in Psalms 40:8. However, the word used in Jonah 1:17 is not Me-ay, it's actually "Bim-e". Bim-e is translated "was in the belly". Was there evidence that led you to believe the word was actually Me-ay, or was it just something you thought of as you were studying? (If there was such evidence, please present it!) Now, your point on God's proper name being replaced with LORD is more interesting! To my knowledge, it is technically true that God's proper name was translated LORD out of deference for God. The reason for this (at least, the one I think is the reason) is quite simple, the Hebrew name God gave to the Israelites simply cannot be translated perfectly into English. (To my knowledge.) As you mentioned, the closest we can translate in English is the Tetragrammaton YHWH. This is an unreadable and unpronounceable name, because it does not have any vowels. It also is not even technically an English word, because it doesn't have any vowels. So, my understanding is that unless the translators left God's name in an unreadable form (either the actual Hebrew or the Tetragrammaton,) literally ANY translation would have been wrong. Because God's name in Hebrew does not translate perfectly into English. (Though to be fair, they might have guessed the vowels correctly, it just wouldn't have then been a translation per se.) So it is probably true that the translators replaced God's proper name with LORD out of deference to Him, because if they would have attempted a translation it would have been an imperfect translation. While the translators seemed totally fine throwing in vowels for readability in names like Jonah, they seem to have been understandably cautious with the name of God. In the Hebrew culture (as you probably know from your studies) every name had a meaning. So the way the translators got around this dilemma, it seems, was attempting to translate the meaning of the name God gave the Israelites instead of the actual proper name itself. This would be roughly the equivalent of the translators replacing the name "Jacob" in the Bible with the name "holder of the heel". Because Jacob means "holder of the heel". So to understand what God's proper name means, we should look at the place where God first gives His proper name, which I believe is Exodus 3: 13-15 "And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations." The word "LORD" here, I think, is the first time God gives His name. So from looking at this, it appears that the meaning of the name God gave to Moses means "I AM THAT I AM" in the context of the Israelites challenging His messenger. From this, it seems that God's proper name means that He is sovereign and absolute in authority. The meaning of God's name (it seems), the idea that He is sovereign and absolute, is then put into the English name "LORD". (Which, as a side note, I believe the Jewish people had been using long beforehand because they did not like to say the name of God aloud.) So, because it seems impossible to translate the name of God in Hebrew perfectly into a name in English, the translators translated the meaning of the Hebrew word into the English name "LORD". This seems perfectly reasonable to me (I am certainly up for a revisement of my theory, if you have a better one) so I am interested to hear your reasons against it! That said, just as a preliminary argument, we know the Bible records the words of God because (for one) the Being the words allegedly come from consistently demonstrated control of reality in a host of accurate decrees about the future, such as Ezekiel 26 which predicts the fall of Tyre in explicate detail, Jeremiah 23: 8 which predicts that the Jews will be gathered from the "land of the north" and reform the nation of Israel, the explicate prophecies about Jesus (Isaiah being one book to look at), Isaiah 44:28 which predicts that a king named Cyrus will rebuild Jerusalem, and quite a few more. However, it seems that your primary point of contention is that you hold that the Bible was significantly altered. So we'll stay there for a while! It seems that our primary cause for debate right now is whether the word "LORD" instead of an attempted translation of God's proper name is a significant variation. Obviously my current position is that it is not.