What does YHWH mean?

Four letters

In Hebrew the name is four consonants, yod, he, vav, he, written right to left: יהוה. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, so the letters keep the skeleton of the word but not its sound. Scholars call it the Tetragrammaton, Greek for “four letters.” It is by far the most frequent name in the Hebrew Bible, close to 6,800 times, far more than Elohim, “God.”

“I AM WHO I AM”

The Bible explains the name at the burning bush. Moses asks what to tell the Israelites when they ask who sent him.

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM,” and he said, “You shall tell the children of Israel this: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

In Hebrew it is ehyeh asher ehyeh, from the verb hayah, “to be.” Ehyeh can mean “I am” or “I will be,” so the sentence can also read “I will be what I will be.” In the next verse God gives the name itself, YHWH, and adds, “This is my name forever” (Exodus 3:15). Most scholars take YHWH as a form of the same verb: “he is,” “he will be,” or, some argue, “he causes to be.” When God speaks of himself, he says ehyeh, I am. When people speak of him, the name says: he is.

Why Jews don’t say it

Reverence for the name grew around the commandment “You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh your God” (Exodus 20:7). By the last centuries before Jesus, it was no longer spoken in daily life. The Mishnah remembers one exception: on the Day of Atonement the high priest pronounced it, and the people in the Temple courts fell on their faces when they heard it (Mishnah Yoma 6:2). After the Temple fell in AD 70, even that ended.

In its place, Jewish readers say Adonai, “my Lord,” and in conversation HaShem, “the Name.” Some Dead Sea Scrolls write the four letters in the old Hebrew script, set apart from the rest of the line. Greek Bibles came to translate it Kyrios, “Lord,” and the New Testament does the same when it quotes the Old.

Yahweh or Jehovah?

In the Middle Ages, the Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes added vowel marks to the Hebrew text. Over YHWH they wrote the vowels of Adonai, as a reminder to say Adonai. Christian scholars later read the four letters with those borrowed vowels and produced a hybrid: Jehovah. William Tyndale printed it as “Iehouah” in his Pentateuch of 1530, and the King James Version kept it in a few verses: “by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them” (Exodus 6:3, King James Version, 1611).

Yahweh, the form scholars use, is a reconstruction. Early Christian writers recorded Greek spellings such as Iabe, which Theodoret of Cyrrhus gave as the Samaritan pronunciation. A short form, Yah, survives in every hallelujah, “praise Yah,” and in names like Elijah, “my God is Yah.” The oldest certain writing of the name outside the Bible is on the Mesha Stele, a Moabite king’s victory inscription from about 840 BC, now in the Louvre.

What Bibles do today

Most English Bibles print “the LORD” in small capitals wherever the Hebrew has YHWH. A few, including the World English Bible quoted on this page, print Yahweh. Jehovah’s Witnesses use Jehovah. In 2008 the Vatican asked that Catholic worship not use or pronounce the name Yahweh, out of respect for Jewish practice. Jesus’s own Hebrew name carries a piece of it, as Yeshua explains.