The TetragrammatonPronounced ; ; also known as the Tetragram. is the four-letter Hebrew-language theonym (transliterated as YHWH or YHVH), the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. The four Hebrew letters, written and read from right to left, are yod, he, vav, and he.The word "tetragrammaton" originates from Greek 'four' and ( ) 'letter'. The name may be derived from a verb that means 'to be', 'to exist', 'to cause to become', or 'to come to pass'.
While there is no consensus about the structure and etymology of the name, the form Yahweh (with niqqud: ) is now almost universally accepted among Biblical and Semitic linguistics scholars,The form Yahweh is also dominant in Christianity, but is not used in Islam or Judaism. though the vocalization Jehovah continues to have wide usage, primarily in Christian traditions. In modernity, Christianity is the only Abrahamic religion in which the Tetragrammaton is freely and openly pronounced.
The books of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible except Esther, Ecclesiastes, and (with a possible instance of (Jah) in verse 8:6) the Song of Songs contain this Hebrew name.
Observant Jews and those who follow Talmudic Jewish traditions do not pronounce nor do they read aloud proposed transcription forms such as Yahweh or Yehovah; instead they replace it with a different term, whether in addressing or referring to the God of Israel. Common substitutions in Hebrew are (, , pluralis majestatis taken as singular) or (Elohim, literally 'gods' but treated as singular when meaning "God") in prayer, or (HaShem, 'The Name') in everyday speech.
Four letters
The letters, properly written and read from right to left (in Biblical Hebrew), are: Hebrew Letter name Pronunciation Yod He Vav or , or placeholder for "O"/"U" vowel (see mater lectionis) He (or often a silent letter at the end of a word)
Etymology
The Hebrew Bible explains it by the formula ( ), the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14. The phrase in Exodus 3:14 can be understood not as the revelation of a name, but as an etymological explanation of its meaning. This would frame Y-H-W-H as an imperfective aspect of the Hebrew triconsonantal root (h-y-h), "to be, become, come to pass", with a third person masculine () prefix, equivalent to English "he",Translation notes for It thus probably means "he causes to be, to become, etc." It has (h-w-h) as a variant form. The New Brown–Driver–Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon With an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic by Frances Brown, with the cooperation of S. R. Driver and Charles Briggs (1907), p. 217ff (entry listed under root ). in place of the first person ('-), thereby affording translations as "he who causes to exist", "he who is", etc.; although this would elicit the form Y-H-Y-H (), rather than Y-H-W-H. To rectify this, some scholars propose that the Tetragrammaton derived instead from the triconsonantal root (h-w-h)—itself an archaic doublet of —with the final form eliciting translations similar to those derived from the same.
As such, the consensus among modern scholars considers that YHWH represents a verbal form. In this, the y- prefix represents the third masculine verbal prefix of the verb hyh or hwh, "to be", as indicated in the Hebrew Bible.
Vocalisation
Jews do not pronounce God's four-letter name out of extreme reverence for its holiness and to prevent accidental desecration due an interpretation of Leviticus 24:16. While the exact historical transition is debated, the practice became firmly established during the Second Temple period.
First Temple Era (Before 586 BCE): The name was used more frequently in daily life, greetings, and blessings. Second Temple Era (516 BCE – 70 CE): Uttering the name became restricted to the Jerusalem Temple. Only the High Priest said it aloud, strictly on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Post-Temple Era (70 CE – Present): After the Temple was destroyed, the correct pronunciation was entirely withheld from speech. Over centuries, the original vowels were lost.
YHWH and Hebrew script
Like all letters in the Hebrew script, the letters in YHWH originally indicated consonants. In unpointed Biblical Hebrew, most vowels are not written, but some are indicated ambiguously, as certain letters came to have a secondary function indicating vowels (similar to the Latin use of I and V to indicate either the consonants /j, w/ or the vowels /i, u/). Hebrew letters used to indicate vowels are known as (imot kri'a) or matres lectionis ("mothers of reading"). Therefore, it can be difficult to deduce how a word is pronounced from its spelling, and each of the four letters in the Tetragrammaton can individually serve as a mater lectionis.
Several centuries later, some time in the 5th through 10th centuries CE, the original consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible was provided with vowel marks by the Masoretes to assist reading. In places where the word to be read (the qere) differed from that indicated by the consonants of the written text (the ketiv), they wrote the qere in the margin as a note showing what was to be read. In such a case the vowel marks of the qere were written on the ketiv. For a few frequent words, the marginal note was omitted: these are called qere perpetuum.
One of the frequent cases was the Tetragrammaton, which according to later Rabbinite Jewish practices should not be pronounced but read as (, , Pluralis majestatis taken as singular), or, if the previous or next word already was Adonai, as "Elohim" (/"God"). Writing the vowel diacritics of these two words on the consonants YHVH produces and respectively, ghost-words that would spell "Yehovah" and "Yehovih" respectively.
The oldest complete or nearly complete manuscripts of the Masoretic Text with Tiberian vocalisation, such as the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, both of the 10th or 11th century, mostly write (yəhwā), with no pointing on the first h. It could be because the o diacritic point plays no useful role in distinguishing between Adonai and Elohim and so is redundant, or it could point to the qere being (šmâ), which is Aramaic for "the Name".
Yahweh
The scholarly consensus since the work of German orientalist Heinrich Ewald in the 1840s is that the original pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton was likely Yahweh (). Reasons that favor this vocalization are the Samaritan form Iabé quoted by church fathers Theodoret and Epiphanius, the infixes -yahu and yeho- in compound personal names, and the contracted form yah (as in hallelujah).
The pronunciation Jehovah was unknown until 1520, when it was introduced by Galatinus. The adoption at the time of the Protestant Reformation of "Jehovah" in place of the traditional "Lord" in some new translations, vernacular or Latin, of the biblical Tetragrammaton stirred up dispute about its correctness. In 1711, Adriaan Reland published a book containing the text of 17th-century writings, five attacking and five defending it. As critical of the use of "Jehovah" it incorporated writings by Johannes van den Driesche (1550–1616), known as Drusius; Sixtinus Amama (1593–1629); Louis Cappel (1585–1658); Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629); Jacob Alting (1618–1679). Defending "Jehovah" were writings by Nicholas Fuller (1557–1626) and Thomas Gataker (1574–1654) and three essays by Johann Leusden (1624–1699). The opponents of "Jehovah" said that the Tetragrammaton should be pronounced as "Adonai" and in general do not speculate on what may have been the original pronunciation, although mention is made of the fact that some held that Jahve was that pronunciation. Thomas Worthington, likely author of the annotations to the Catholic Douay Old Testament (1609–1610), expressing the general Catholic view, wrote, "Iehouah is not the right name of God" and "Only certaine late writers haue framed a new word, by putting the points of Adonai, to the proper letters of this vnknowen name, which are Iod, He, Vau, He, and ſo ſound it Iehouah: which was ſcarſe heard of before an hundred yeares.". Annotation on Exodus 6:3.
In 1869, Smith's Bible Dictionary, a collaborative work of scholars of the time, declared: "Whatever, therefore, be the true pronunciation of the word, there can be little doubt that it is not Jehovah." Almost two centuries after the 17th-century works reprinted by Reland, 19th-century Wilhelm Gesenius reported in his Thesaurus Philologicus on the main reasoning of those who argued either for /Yah[w]oh or /Yahweh as the original pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, as opposed to /Yehovah. He explicitly cited the 17th-century writers mentioned by Reland as supporters of , as well as implicitly citing Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) and Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1772–1849), the latter of whom Johann Heinrich Kurtz described as the last of those "who have maintained with great pertinacity that was the correct and original pointing". Edward Robinson's translation of a work by Gesenius, gives Gesenius' personal view as: "My own view coincides with that of those who regard this name as anciently pronounced [/Yahweh] like the Samaritans."
The element yahwi- (ia-wi) is found in Amorite personal names (e.g. yahwi-dagan), commonly denoted as the semantic equivalent of the Akkadian ibašši-DN. The latter refers to one existing which, in the context of deities, can also refer to one's eternal existence, which aligns with Bible verses such as and views that ehye 'ăšer 'ehye can mean "I am the Existing One". It also explains the ease of Israelites applying the Olam (or 'everlasting') epithet from El to Yahweh. But in 1967, J. Philip Hyatt believes it is more likely that yahwi- refers to a god creating and sustaining the life of a newborn child rather than the universe. This conception of God was more popular among ancient Near Easterners but eventually, the Israelites removed the association of yahwi- to any human ancestor and combined it with other elements (e.g. Yahweh ṣəḇāʾōṯ). Hillel Ben-Sasson states in 2019, that there is insufficient evidence for Amorites using yahwi- to refer to a god. But he argues that it mirrors other theophoric names and that yahwi-, or more accurately yawi, derives from the root hwy in pa 'al, which means "he will be".
In 1923, Paul Joüon, in his Grammaire de l'Hébreu biblique, preferred the traditional form Jéhovah rather than the reconstruction Yahweh. However, in the 1996 revised edition, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, prepared by Takamitsu Muraoka and published after Joüon's death, the text states: "The divine name : the Qre is the Lord, whilst the Ktiv is probably (according to ancient witnesses)", and he adds: "Note 1: In our translations, we have used Yahweh, a form widely accepted by scholars, instead of the traditional Jehovah."
In 2010, R. R. Reno agrees that, when in the late first millennium Jewish scholars inserted indications of vowels into the Hebrew Bible, they signalled that what was pronounced was "Adonai" (Lord); non-Jews later combined the vowels of Adonai with the consonants of the Tetragrammaton and invented the name "Jehovah". Mark P. Arnold remarks in 2015, that certain conclusions drawn from the pronunciation of as "Yahweh" would be valid even if the scholarly consensus were not correct.
Yaho
In 1925, F. C. Burkitt reports that a deity named Yaho or Yeho may have been recognized before the divine revelation to Moses. G. H. Parke-Taylor (1975) states that "of the various alternative forms that have been proposed, the most probable is Yaho or Yahu". He further notes, "Although Yahweh seems to be a probable pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, since Yahu does not fully account for the final he, there cannot be complete certainty about it.… We can only surmise that Yahweh is the correct pronunciation."