Glossary

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hwhy, the most common name for ancient Israel’s God, occurs 6,823 times in the Hebrew Bible. That’s not counting the variant forms of it that appear as an element in hundreds of personal names.

hwhy was the distinctive name of Israel’s God; no other deity was known by this name. Yet, important as it is in the history of Israelite religion, there is neither unanimity nor clarity in the translation of the name. Scholars have variously rendered it as “LORD” (all letters in the upper case), “YHWH,” “Yahweh” or “Jehovah.” In personal names, what scholars call the “Yahwistic theophoric element” appears in the initial position as Yeho– (Jeho-) or Yo– (Jo-), as in the two forms for “Jonathan,” Yehonatan and Yonatan. In the final position it appears as –yahu (-iah) or –yah (-iah), as in the alternate spellings for “Azariah,” Azaryahu and Azaryah.

Can we find a path through the philological and theological maze that the ineffable name of Israel’s God has become to readers of the Bible?

The Hebrew alphabet consists of consonants only. Vowel points were not added until hundreds of years later. So the name of God in the Hebrew Bible is simply spelled with the consonants YHWH. These four letters are known in ancient and modern scholarly writings as the tetragrammaton (Greek for “the four lettered [name]”), a term already used by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria in the first century C.E.^a The final H in YHWH is not a real consonant, however. Beginning in the monarchial period (tenth to late seventh centuries B.C.E.), certain letters (h [H], w [W], y [Y]) were added at the end of words to indicate various vowels; these three letters, which grammarians call matres lectionis (mothers of reading), served to give some general indication of vowel quality until the Masoretes (Jewish scholars of the fifth to eleventh centuries C.E.) introduced vowel points for more precision in pronunciation. So the real consonants of the divine name are YHW but, YHWH is the more common spelling in the Bible and in inscriptions.

The divine name is attested in extra-biblical inscriptions in the Phoenician, or paleo-Hebrew, script used in the first millennium B.C.E. The earliest undisputed attestation of YHWH is in the Moabite Stone erected by Mesha, the king of Moab, around the middle of the ninth century B.C.E.

The four letter form YHWH appears over 20 times in various Hebrew inscriptions from the ninth century B.C.E. onwards. It is found, for example, in several inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud in the Sinai.^b Among the attestations of the name in the inscriptions from that site is one example of YHW, which may have been pronounced yahwe, the final vowel not being indicated by the letter H in this instance. In any case, the fuller form YHWH appears to be far and away the dominant spelling through the time of the Babylonian Exile (sixth century B.C.E.), from which period we find the name in the Lachish ostraca and in two silver amulets containing fragments of the priestly benediction (Numbers 6:24–26).^c

Since the early texts do not indicate precise vocalization, one cannot be certain of the pronunciation of YHWH. The problem is compounded by the fact that some time in the Second Temple period (fifth century B.C.E.), the tetragrammaton YHWH came to be regarded as holy and ineffable. So other designations of God came to be preferred and it became common to use substitutes for the name. Some of the scrolls and fragments from Qumran have the tetragrammaton in archaic paleo-Hebrew script (which by this time had been replaced by the square Aramaic script still in use today), and some scrolls indicate it by means of four or five dots.¹ These and other techniques of avoidance in some of the materials from Qumran may indicate that the name YHWH was not pronounced as such. The five dots may have stood for the letters ’dwny (Adonay, “Lord”), while the four dots probably substituted for the four consonants or letters of the tetragrammaton, which were nevertheless to be pronounced as Adonay. As one reads in the Babylonian Talmud: “The Holy One, blessed be He said, ‘I am not pronounced as I am written; I am written with [the letters] yod he, but I am pronounced by alef 050daleth’” (Kiddushin 71a). That is to say, although the name was written as YH[WH], it was pronounced as ’d[wny] (Adonay), “Lord.”

The practice of using a different script for writing the divine name is also evident in some of the Greek fragments of Christian texts, which have the tetragrammaton either in the then-current Hebrew (Aramaic) script or even in the older paleo-Hebrew script.² The name so written was probably also pronounced as Adonay, as it was at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Not surprisingly, therefore, the great Christian Greek codices of the Bible of the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. consistently read Kyrios “Lord” where the tetragrammaton appears in the Hebrew version.

In short, it became a custom from the Second Temple period on to read Adonay or Kyrios, both meaning “Lord,” in place of the personal name YHWH.

The Masoretes first introduced vowel points into Hebrew. In the Tiberian tradition, which has the most developed and influential pointing system, the vowels were usually placed under the consonants sequentially; only one (the vowel point for o) is put above the letter.

Due to their reverence for the text, it was extremely rare for the copyists to change or “correct” the consonantal text. They preferred rather to use vowel points to indicate what to read, keeping the consonants intact. The divine name was, thus, always written as YHWH, but the vowel points indicated that it was to be read as Adonay; or, in the case of the name’ dwny YHWH, the tetragrammaton was to be read as Elohim (“God,” hence “LORD God”)—so one would not say “ ‘Adonay Adonay.” Thus the vowels for Adonay (a-o-a) were superimposed on the tetragrammaton except that the first vowel was further changed from a to e, in accordance with rules of Hebrew grammar. The intention was to indicate the tetragrammaton with the vowels for Adonay. But it looked like YEHOWAH, although it was never meant to be read that way; no attempt was made to pronounce the letters YHWH.

In the 16th century, however, some interpreters took the impossible hybrid form at face value and Latinized it as IeHoVaH. From this the Germanic form Jehovah was derived in the early European translations and attested in 17th-century English. That version of the name has persisted in a few translations in this century. Most English Bibles, however, have followed the old practice of rendering the tetragrammaton as LORD—entirely in capital letters to distinguish it from Lord, which translates Adonay and its synonyms.

Many modern scholars believe that the tetragrammaton YHWH was actually spoken as Yahweh. This is based in part on the Greek transliteration of the name in the early Christian period and in some magical papyri in the early centuries of that era, including, Iaoue, Iaouai, Iabe, Iabai and Iaue.³ Particularly interesting are the occurrences of Iabe zebuth, which must have translated Yahweh-Sabaoth, the so-called LORD of Hosts.⁴ Further evidence that the tetragrammaton was vocalized as Yahweh are the second-millennium B.C.E. personal names among the Amorites, a migratory West Semitic-speaking people from Upper Mesopotamia. These Amorite names have the pattern Yahwi + Divine Name (Yahwi-Ilu [El in Hebrew]).⁵

The tetragrammaton is understood by scholars to be related to the root HWH (originally HWY, later HYY/HYH) “to be, exist, be present.” The name YHWH is, in any case, a verb form, commonly believed to be a causative meaning “he (God) causes to be”—that is, “he creates,” or “he brings to pass (promises),” or the like. Some scholars believe that the original name was part of a longer formula, something like ‘il du yahwi saba’ot “El (God) who creates the (heavenly) hosts”;⁶ or yahwi-’il, “El (God) creates.”⁷ On the other hand, the causative of the root is not attested anywhere; moreover the etymology of the name given in Exodus 3:14 (Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, usually translated “I am that I am”) assumes the simple present (“exist, be present”), not the causative (“cause to exist”).⁸ So perhaps the name meant “he (God) is present.”⁹

In actual practice “the LORD” has become for Christians the name of the God of the Hebrew Bible. However, Orthodox Jews deem even the substitute name Adonay too close to the actual divine name to use when they refer to God in ordinary speech (as distinguished from prayer where they pronounce the word as Adonay); in ordinary speech they simply refer to the tetragrammaton as Ha-Shem, Hebrew for “The Name.”

hwhy, the most common name for ancient Israel’s God, occurs 6,823 times in the Hebrew Bible. That’s not counting the variant forms of it that appear as an element in hundreds of personal names.