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Mark 12:36 — On "Lord" vs. "Lord"

Why does the ISV render Mark 12:36's quotation of Psalm 110:1 "The Lord said to my Lord..." instead of reading "The Lord said to my Lord..."? The Hebrew uses the divine name in Psalm 110:1 in the first instance of "Lord," so why doesn't the ISV reflect this in the Old Testament quotation?

The Greek NT uses the same word κύριος as the second and sixth words in the sentence you've quoted from Mark 12:36 in the ISV. But the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text (dated about 900-1000 AD) uses the Hebrew word  יהוה (the name of God)  in the first instance and the Hebrew word אדֹנִי (which means "Lord") for the second occurrence.

To sum up, the Greek makes no distinction that the MT of the Hebrew OT makes. The citation from Psalm 110:1 by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark is, strictly speaking, a free-verse translation from the Hebrew into Greek by Jesus called a targum. Targumim (the plural word) were made on the fly by cantors in synagogues of the first century. When the Tanakh was read in the synagogue in Hebrew, often times a separate translator would render the text freely into the native language of the speakers, someone analogous to the pattern of a U.N. translator today. These renderings are called targumim. Since the Gk. of all NT quotes of the OT never distinguish between YHWH and ADONAI, we don't make such a distinction in the ISV, in keeping with our principle of translation that dictates we translate Gk. and/or Heb. ambiguities by a similar ambiguity in English. We'll let the commentators speak on these kinds of nuances.

This ISV reader then replied as follows:

Thank you so much for your explanation. One of the things that impress me about the ISV is that it translates the original language honestly. Makes me scratch my head when I read that translators insert their personal bias into a translation and translate the passage as “The LORD said to my Lord” such as what the KJV and NKJV done here. On a personal note, is there any word in the Greek that would refer to the name of God which many pronounce as Yahweh which could have been used here?

If my memory serves me correctly, when I was studying in my undergraduate degree, a visiting professor of religion from the U.K. pointed me to an article on that very subject in which the author claimed that a Greek language Hebrew grammar (!) had been found which gave a pronunciation guide in the Greek alphabet for the sacred name YHWH. In Greek letters, the word spelled out IOUBE (yow-bay), which is very close to the word Yahweh that we know today. That's the best I know, at any rate, and that Gk. pronunciation guide doesn't appear anywhere in the NT or early apostolic literature.