The Tetragrammaton: God’s Name Revealed

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

Updated November 2022

What is God’s personal name?

The answer to that question is found in the story of Moses at the burning bush. After receiving his call from God, Moses offers several objections, including the fact that he doesn’t even know God’s name. Moses says,

“Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” (Ex. 3:13 NIV)

Why did Moses need to know God’s name?

Moses’s conversation with God occurred during Israel’s bondage in Egypt. At the time, the Egyptians worshipped many gods. In fact, Brittanica says, “Egypt had one of the largest and most complex pantheons of gods of any civilization in the ancient world. Over the course of Egyptian history hundreds of gods and goddesses were worshipped.” Hence, it would be understandable if the Israelites, who were surrounded by Egyptian gods, wanted to know the identity of Moses’s God.

God responds by stating, “I AM WHO I AM” then commands Moses to say two things to the people of Israel:

  1. “I AM has sent me to you”
  2. “‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’

    “This is my name forever,
        the name you shall call me
        from generation to generation.

“I AM” is a powerful statement in a polytheistic world. Individual gods were often responsible for specific things, such as rivers, weather, the sun, the harvest, etc. But this god is asserting his authority over all by stating “I AM.”

As you can see, the names “I AM” and “the LORD” are closely connected and used interchangeably. But in Hebrew they have a closer connection because they share certain letters. The LORD, however, is explicitly identified as the name the Israelites should use for God as stated at the end of verse 15: “This is my name forever.” And later in Exodus, God tells Moses, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name, ‘The LORD'” (33:19). Explicitly identifying God’s name with “The LORD” is confirmed in other passages. For example,

  • Let them know that you, whose name is the LORD— that you alone are the Most High over all the earth. (Ps. 83:18)
  • Then they will know that my name is the LORD. (Jer. 16:21).

So what kind of name is “the LORD”?

The Tetragrammaton

Many English Bibles use the word “LORD”—capital L followed by small capital letters as a translation for God’s personal name. (I’m not sure how to insert small caps on this blog.) In Hebrew, the personal name of God is composed of four letters and those four letters enter English as YHWH. (More below on the controversial Y and W and missing vowels.) This four-letter name is known as the Tetragrammaton.

Ancient Scribal Habits

We’ve all struggled to pronounce certain words correctly, but how can we possibly pronounce YHWH? The challenge of pronouncing the Tetragrammaton is not unique to English speakers. The problem stems from the ancient scribes who hand-copied the Scriptures. Centuries after the Hebrew texts were originally composed, medieval Jewish scribes, known as Masoretes, added vowel points to the words to ensure correct pronunciation. But they hit a stop sign when they saw God’s personal name. In particular, they were frozen by their tradition of not pronouncing God’s name.

Why did they avoid speaking or writing God’s name?

Many point to the Ten Commandments, and specifically, the command that says, “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name” (Ex 20:7). This command discouraged ancient Jews from uttering God’s name.

So what did the scribes do?

What would you do?

If your job was to help people pronounce written words correctly by adding vowel points, but you didn’t want them to pronounce one of the words in your text, what would you do? Think about it, you can’t erase the word because you respect the text too much. And you can’t ignore the word and hope no one notices because it appears almost 7,000 times. What would you do?

The ancient Hebrew scribes came up with this solution: insert the vowels of another word used for God—adonai, meaning “Lord”—into the name YHWH. In this way, scribes were telling readers to say “adonai” when they came to YHWH. (At times, they also inserted the vowels from “elohim,” meaning God.)

What was the source of this unique practice?

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint (LXX) help us trace scribal habits more than a millennium earlier. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible completed around 100 BC. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of about 800 scrolls containing copies of the Hebrew Bible along with sectarian writings. They were first discovered in 1947 and date to the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD.

According to Emmanuel Tov, a Hebrew scholar and expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the DSS scribes used a variety of practices with the divine name, including using paleo-Hebrew, which is an older Hebrew script as well as simply writing four dots, which scholars call tetrapuncta. While most of the DSS are written in Hebrew, some are in Greek. A Greek version of Leviticus 26 even uses a trigrammaton (three letters) for God’s name. In English these letters are Iao.

Additionally, the earliest Septuagint manuscripts reveal a remarkable practice: the divine name was written with its Hebrew consonants. Imagine writing a book in Greek for a Greek-speaking audience while preserving one prominent word in Hebrew. Subsequent Septuagint manuscripts transcribe the Tetragrammaton with the Greek word kyrios, meaning Lord.

English Translations

Scribal ingenuity leaves us with a translation dilemma: How should we translate the Tetragrammaton in English? Here are five popular options.

  1. Adhere to the tradition found in many English Bible versions and use “the LORD.” This option is problematic because it causes confusion between the title Lord and the name LORD as both are spelled and pronounced the same. If you read one of the Bible versions that use LORD, remember that LORD does not equal Lord. LORD is not a title; LORD is God’s personal name. The LORD, then, is not a translation of God’s name, but a reverential way of avoiding it.
  2. Use the vowels of adonai and come up with something like Jehovah so “Jehovah God” instead of “the LORD God.” This was a popular solution in the past and the option used by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Many modern scholars, however, do not think Jehovah is an accurate way of writing the Tetragrammaton.
  3. Follow modern-day scholars who believe Yahweh is the most accurate rendering, so Yahweh God. But if scribes inserted the vowels from adonai into YHWH, what happened to the o? (More on this below.)
  4. Since scribes inserted the vowels centuries after the text was written, other scholars believe YHWH God is the most accurate rendering. But how would we pronounce “YHWH God” during a public reading of Scripture? And what about the possibility of a J or V? (More on this below.)
  5. Use Hashem, the Hebrew word meaning “the Name,” as found in the Orthodox Jewish Bible. This is also a reverential way of avoiding the Tetragrammaton.

The Consonants 

In Hebrew the consonants in the Tetragrammaton are yod, he, waw, he (read from right to left).

Since Hebrew does not have a j sound, most scholars believe the first letter should be transliterated as y. It’s true that English translators often use a j for Hebrew words beginning with yod, such as Jerusalem, Jacob, Joshua, and Jeremiah, but in Hebrew all of those words are actually pronounced with an initial y sound. So if we want to get as close as possible to the original pronunciation of the divine name, we should stick with y. By the way, notice how the j is pronounced in hallelujah. The last part of hallelujah—(pronounced yah)—is the first part of God’s name so it means “Praise Yah.”

I am not aware of any controversial issues with the second (and fourth) consonant in the divine name. However, the third consonant can be understood as either a waw (w) or vav (v). Many believe the original w sound morphed into the v sound. Based in part on a sixth century Hebrew poet as well as how Hebrew is spoken around the world today, Nehemia Gordon argues that in biblical times this letter was pronounced with a v sound. Either way, we don’t have hard data from ancient Israel before Christ.

The Vowels

The standard view mentioned above is that Jewish scribes added the vowel points from adonai to the sacred name so that readers would pronounce “adonai” when they saw YHWH. This practice of changing the pronunciation of a word by inserting vowels from another word is called ketiv-qere (Aramaic for “what is written/what is said”) and it was used for other words as well.

But the Tetragrammaton does not have the same vowels as adonai so how can this theory of transference be correct?

First of all, this matter is complicated by the fact that scribes used a variety of vowel markings for the Tetragrammaton. Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest sacred Hebrew manuscripts were the Aleppo Codex (10th century) and Leningrad Codex (11th century). This Wikipedia article includes the following chart for data in the Leningrad Codex:

As you can see, the Leningrad Codex uses six different vowel combinations for the sacred name. Likewise, the Aleppo Codex uses various forms for God’s name. And in the Dead Sea Scroll fragments, the Tetragrammaton appears in different scripts: paleo-Hebrew, square Hebrew script, tetrapuncta (four dots or dashes), and even Iao—the Greek form of Yhw. So in the Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Aleppo Codex, and Leningrad Codex, God’s name does not have one consistent form. Even without the vowel variations, the consonants have been written in three different ways as seen below.

Second, the difference in vowels between the sacred name and adonai can be explained by the rules of Hebrew phonology. For instance, rules dictate which vowels go with words starting with yod versus words starting with a gutteral. If you want to know the technical details, I recommend listening to this talk by Tim Hegg. (In case you need a chart for the Hebrew vowels, see here.) Hegg explains the following,

The use of the single sheva in the form יְהוָה came about on the principles of Hebrew phonology. The chataf patach is used to replace a vocal sheva (שְוָה נָח) whenever it would occur with a guttural. Thus, “Adonai,” which begins with a guttural, has the chataf patach (אֲדֹנָי). When, however, the vowels of Adonai were put on YHVH, since the first letter is a yod, which is not a guttural, it would have been technically incorrect to place a chataf patach there. The simple sheva was used, therefore, which conformed to Masoretic phonological rules. (Cited here.)

Third, Hare notes that in some circumstances the different vowels can be explained by the fact that scribes inserted the vowels from elohim (God), when they wanted “elohim” to be pronounced instead of adonai. 

Fourth, in the majority of cases where the Tetragrammaton appears in the Leningrad Codex, the cholam or o vowel is missing. So did it have an o or not? Gordon argues that the two-vowel instances are abbreviated forms of the original name, which he contends was Yahovah. In other words, Gordon believes the original vowels have been preserved in certain places, but this is not the majority view.

Jason Hare at the Hebrew Café believes that the scribal habit of dropping the cholam can be traced back to the way adonai was treated in the Aleppo Codex. While a variety of vowel markings are used, Hare says that in 97% of the cases where adonai appears in the Aleppo Codex the cholam is absent. So, for the most part, since the cholam was dropped in adonai, it was also dropped in the Tetragrammaton. So did the Tetragrammaton originally have an o or not? In this paper, Hare says he favors Yahveh as the original pronunciation, but he is not dogmatic about it.

Conclusion

Some argue that this challenge applies to other Hebrew words, but that is not the case. When scribes used ketiv-qere, they usually wrote the proper pronunciation in the margin, but they did not do so with the Tetragrammaton.

It seems that most agree on the pronunciation of the first part of God’s personal name—Yah. Perhaps Gordon is right about the v, which would give us YHVH. I would sum up the consonantal data this way:

  • Y (most likely)
  • H (certain)
  • V (disputed) or W (disputed)
  • H (certain)

The vowels, though, remain a mystery. If the vowels were transferred from another word, as most scholars believe, they tell us nothing about the original vowels of the sacred name. We can’t even say for certain if the Tetragrammaton had two or three syllables.

Despite the many confident assertions, I don’t see how we can do better than offer educated guesses. We have some letters, but the divine name remains inexpressible.

 

 

14 thoughts on “The Tetragrammaton: God’s Name Revealed”

  1. Dear Sir
    I am curious, more so because i had a very bad education until i came in contact with Jehovah’s witnesses, but if using the reasoning about correct pronunciation, Are not Jeremiah Hezekiah and all those famous men of the old testament names wrong too? surely using this reasoning all those Characters names must all be wrong? But are all accepted today! Take all of these away because of fear of miss- pronouncing them and we would have very little to base our understanding of the Bible on surely ? what of Jesus genealogy in Matthew chapter 1 (Joseph’s family line)and Jesus genealogy though Mary’s family in Luke 3 23 ? again how would we understand who these family member were if we take away the consonants? I addressed you as Sir because i don’t know your personal name But would it have been better to leave the consonant out and just address you as Dr Sr ? please have a read of the text below and see if it adds up for you ? I would be only too glad to hear from you
    Regards
    Jon Bishop

    Reply
    • Thanks for your response Jon. (I’ve deleted the lengthy list of quotes you gave, but I think I got the gist of them.) Regarding the other words in the Hebrew Bible, we are fairly certain how to pronounce them. And that certainty is based on trust in the ancient scribes who inserted vowel points into the consonantal Hebrew text. If any group of people knew how to pronounce the Hebrew words of Scripture it would have been the ancient Hebrew scribes who spoke Hebrew and were immersed in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible. As far as I know these scribes only deliberately used vowels from another word for the Tetragrammaton. So we have no reason to suspect inaccurate vowels for any other Hebrew word.

      Regarding the quotes you sent, some of them seem to say what I said in my post such as, “No human today can be certain how it was originally pronounced in Hebrew.” And “Many scholars favor the spelling ‘Yahweh,’ but it is uncertain and there is not agreement among them.” But from that state of uncertainty your quotes move toward approval for the use of the name Jehovah. For example, “German professor Gustav Friedrich Oehler concluded: ‘From this point onward I use the word Jehovah, because, as a matter of fact, this name has now become more naturalized in our vocabulary, and cannot be supplanted.’”—Theologie des Alten Testaments, second edition (Stuttgart, 1882), p. 143. I cannot agree with that statement. It’s a purely pragmatic argument and it ignores the facts from which your quotes began. Furthermore, it was written more than a century ago in a different country from my own. If I were to use that same argument today and from my particular location, I would have to conclude that the name LORD should be the preferred translation for the Tetragrammaton. But in fact, I don’t believe that is the case. I actually think a strong case can be made for Yahweh, but I’m not sure if that’s the most accurate rendering either.

      Regarding the use of Jehovah in the Greek New Testament, I don’t know of any evidence to support that assertion. Our earliest manuscripts of the New Testament were all written in Greek and in those manuscripts we don’t find Jehovah or Yahweh, but kyrios which is the Greek word for Lord. That’s all we have, at this point. Anything else is speculation.

      Thanks again and keep searching for truth wherever you can find it.

      Reply
    • Jesus does not have a family line or genealogy. Jesus always existed. Jesus was there in the beginning when Tetragrammaton יהוה said Let us make man in our own image and likeness.
      Jesus was transformed into a human baby and placed in Mary’s womb.

      Reply
      • Of course God the Son in personhood is the Eternal Divine Spirit distinct in person from God the Father and God the Spirit has always existed. but His human nature being distinct from His Divine nature was prepared taking in union to His person a mortal yet not fallen human nature.

        It’s called the hypostatic union

        So his human nature did not always exist thus created for him and nitted together in the womb by the Holy Spirit

        Reply
  2. Proper names especially that of the Creator as according to His command not to ‘ misuse’ ie take in vain His Name cannot except falsely , truly be rendered other than by a willful impropriety of measure by the evil tranlators. In other words , if you cannot properly pronounce or ‘carry over’ to the recipient language , you must leave that NAME unmolested. Example YHWH does not phonetically sound like J-hovah . No ‘J’ existed in Eng until the 1700’s , therefore if it were have been corrupted, ‘sanitized’ or vulgarized the transfer would be IoUWw , Yah(oo)wah but never J-ehovah or other nonsense as the blatant L-O-R-D . The ‘circe’ (church) deluged with idolatry could never accept the Mono-theistic Hebrew GOD YHWH. No room for the Trinity and other doctrines of devils to co-habitate with Eloah Echad.

    Reply
    • Thanks for the comment Jay. I don’t share your negative view of the translators. I think they were doing the best they could with a difficult word. And in fact, the tradition of using Adonai (Lord) for YHWH goes back to the ancient translators of the Greek Septuagint. Furthermore, if the translators decided not to translate God’s personal name, what should they do with it on a practical level? Should their translations include a blank space, or a special mark, or the actual Hebrew letters, or the English letters YHWH? What I’m saying is that the difficult translation decision doesn’t go away by simply asserting that we shouldn’t tamper with the Hebrew name.

      Reply
      • do you realize there is no W in the biblical Hebrew? why would it be wrong to leave God’s Name as YHVH? The W is not of the Biblical Hebrew so leaving it as is would not be inaccurate if we use the letters Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey and even more so YAHVH , YAH being a shortened form of YHVH.

        And where we Get HalleluYah Praise Yah
        EliYAH God is Yah
        Etc.

        Reply
        • I understand that there is a long and complicated history of certain sounds in several languages, including the w and v sound and the y and j sound. Regarding the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, I believe ancient Hebrew used a w sound, while modern Hebrew uses a v sound. Here’s a brief explanation from a professor of biblical Hebrew:

          http://hebrewgrammar.sbts.edu/page2/page2.html

          As a result, when I have seen the Tetragrammaton written in consonant form, I have almost always seen it written as YHWH. In either case, it doesn’t affect the point that is fairly impractical for people reading aloud to say “YHWH God” or “YHVH God” every time it appears in the Bible.

          Reply
  3. Adonai, which means lord, is the title of YHWH used by the believers. It is like common people would not call King Arthur, Arthur. Instead, common people would call King Arthur, King. Adonai is not a name; it is a title. Sometimes you will see the two words YHWH eloheim being written side by side. Eloheim means powers. The singular form is El. I suppose El is kind of like the word deity or god in English. One thing is for sure. The name of the deity that Moses met was not GOD. Don’t call him GOD cause this word is not very meaningful. It can mean any super being. You can call him YHWH god though, which is YHWH eloheim. But since there is only one god, you can still call him eloheim/god. However, YHWH has real meaning attached to it. YHWH means “I live”. In Moses’ time, when people were confused, not knowing how to live, they will pray to YHWH. Only through YHWH, they would attain true living.

    Reply
  4. Tetragrammaton יהוה is GOD’s Name forever!
    In the Bible the Hebrew Name for God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 3), consisting of the four consonants Y H V H (or Y H W H) and regarded by Jews as too sacred to be pronounced. It is usually transliterated as Jehovah or Yahweh.
    Exodus 3:15 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.
    How is using other Words or Adding Vowels to GOD’s Personal Name “יהוה – YH V H – Tetragrammaton” a way of showing Reverence without pronouncing it properly???
    If you know how to pronounce GOD’s Personal Name “Tetragrammaton” properly and then deliberately say His Name improperly or anyway different, how is that being respectful and reverent to “Tetragrammaton?”
    WHY has GOD’s Personal Name “Tetragrammaton” been hidden by Hebrew Sages and Rebbe???
    Know the Truth and the Truth will set you Free!
    Respectfully – I THE PREACHER

    Reply
  5. If everyone knows how to pronounce Torah how is it so difficult to say YHWH. Its right there in front of you and so easy to speak. Try to say it and it will come out of you. It Yahwah. Not hard. Yah made it simple. Men made it difficult because they want to hide his Name.

    Reply
    • Every time you breathe you pronounce Gods true name. Inward is YH and outward is WH. By design he forces us to pronounce his name so long as we live.

      Reply
  6. It’s incredible how The Catholic Church through Scholars, and then various authors, commentators, etc have CHANGED the TRUE words of Him..

    It’s the ELEPHANT in the room that EVERYBODY is attempting to COVER UP, going to HUGEEEE lengths…. It’s inconceivable that the Bible is SO TAMPERED with will the SAME ones who tamper with it, says they are “inspired by Him”

    And you shall KNOW the truth, and the TRUTH shall set you free”:

    Here’s the TRUTH: “G-d in Me, the Hope of Glory”! Did you Get That? Yeshua : Now, say it SLOWLY!!! is it that once you know this, All Churches, “Scholars”, “inspired men of G-d”, “authors”, “writers” will Loose their Power and Control once everyone knows? Exactly Who inspired these “inspired men of G-d”? Even the Pope confirms that Catholic Church THROUGH “inspired men” has CHANGED the Bible…

    Well, at least, Christianity are now completely Naked. “scholars”, “authors”,”inspired men”, “writers” and “Churches have now NOWHERE to hide any more!!!

    “Wolves in Sheep’s clothing”?

    “They run to the mountains to hide their face, but the mountains will cry out ‘no hiding place”‘

    Reply

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