The Tetragrammaton: God’s Name Revealed

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:

“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 a multitude of Egyptian gods, wanted to know the identity of Moses’s God. Is Moses’s God one of the gods of Egypt or someone else?

God responds by stating, “I AM WHO I AM” then commands Moses to say the following 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. (vv. 14-15)

“I AM” is a powerful statement in a polytheistic world. Individual gods were perceived as having control over specific things, such as rivers, weather, the sun, the harvest, etc. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is asserting his authority over all by stating “I AM.”

According to this passage, “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). An explicit identification of God’s name with “The LORD” is also found in other passages:

• 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 before the time of Christ. 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 or during the time of 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, 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. Even in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Tetragrammaton is written in different ways:

• paleo-Hebrew script
• square Hebrew script
• tetrapuncta (four dots or dashes)
• Greek trigrammaton (Iao—the Greek form of Yhw)

So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Aleppo Codex, and Leningrad Codex, God’s name does not have one consistent form. The process of standardization, it seems, was a later development.

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. (If you need a chart with the names of 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, Jason 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. For the most part, then, 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 necessarily 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, but it’s difficult to say for certain. 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 confident assertions of many, I don’t see how we can do better than offer educated guesses. We have some letters, but the divine name in Hebrew remains a mystery.