✨🕯️✨ The Tetragrammaton (from Greek: “four letters”) is the ancient Hebrew name of God, written as יהוה (read right-to-left: Yod-He-Vav-He) and transliterated into English as YHWH (or sometimes YHVH).

Meaning and Significance

It appears over 6,800 times in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh/Old Testament) and derives from the Hebrew root hayah (“to be”). God reveals it to Moses in Exodus 3:14 as “I AM WHO I AM” (or “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE”), emphasizing eternal, self-existent being—the ultimate source of existence.

Pronunciation

Ancient Hebrew lacked written vowels, so the exact original pronunciation is uncertain and lost due to a Jewish tradition starting around the 3rd century BCE of not speaking it aloud (to avoid misusing it, per the Third Commandment). Jews substituted Adonai (“My Lord”) or HaShem (“The Name”) when reading.

• Modern scholarly consensus favors Yahweh (pronounced roughly “YAH-weh”), based on ancient sources, theophoric names (e.g., Elijah = “My God is Yah”), and early Greek transcriptions like “Iao.”

• Jehovah is a later hybrid form (medieval, around the 12th–16th centuries): Masoretic scribes added vowels from “Adonai” to YHWH as a reminder not to say it, resulting in YeHoWaH; Latinized to Jehovah. It’s common in some Christian traditions (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses) but not considered historically accurate. 🤫