What is the name YHWH?

Question 2023

The name YHWH stands at the very heart of how God makes Himself known in the Old Testament, and yet most English readers walk straight past it every time they meet the word LORD printed in small capitals. Behind those four capital letters sits a Hebrew word built from the consonants yod, he, waw, he, written in transliteration as YHWH and known to scholars as the tetragrammaton, meaning simply the four letters. When you understand what this name carries, whole passages of Scripture open up, because the writers chose it deliberately whenever they wanted to speak of God as the faithful, self-existent Lord who keeps covenant with His people.

Israel treated this name with a reverence that is hard for modern readers to feel. It was not one title among many but the personal name God gave when He drew near to rescue. To grasp the name YHWH is to grasp something of how the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob wished to be known, and how He still wishes to be known by everyone who reads His word today.

What the name YHWH actually is

The Hebrew Bible contains many words for God. There is the general word Elohim, which speaks of God as the mighty Creator, and there are titles such as Adonai, meaning Lord or Master. Set apart from all of these is the personal name written with four consonants, the name YHWH. It appears more than six thousand times across the Old Testament, far more often than any other designation for God, which tells you at once how central it is to the way Scripture speaks.

Hebrew was originally written without vowels, so the text preserves only the consonants Y, H, W, H. By the time vowel markings were added by the Masoretes many centuries later, the spoken pronunciation of the name had been laid aside out of reverence, a point we will come back to. For now it is enough to see that the name YHWH is a proper name, not a description. When Moses asked God what he should tell the Israelites, God did not give him an adjective or a job title. He gave him a name, and that name was YHWH.

Scholars connect the name YHWH to the Hebrew verb hayah, to be or to exist. The name carries the sense of the One who is, the One who simply and always exists, depending on nothing outside Himself for His being. Everything else that lives was made and is held in being moment by moment. The name YHWH announces a God who was never made and who never began, the living source of all that is.

Where God first explains the name YHWH

The defining moment comes at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. Moses, hiding in the desert after fleeing Egypt, meets God in a flame that does not consume the bush, and he is sent back to lead a nation out of slavery. Moses protests that the people will ask who has sent him, and God answers with words that have echoed down the centuries. He says, I AM WHO I AM, and then, Say this to the people of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.

That phrase, I AM, is built from the same verb of being that lies behind the name YHWH. In the very next verse God says plainly, The LORD, the God of your fathers, has sent me to you, and the word translated LORD there is the name YHWH itself. So the name YHWH and the great declaration I AM belong together. God is telling Moses that He is the self-existent One, the God who needs nothing and who will be present to save. He is not a tribal deity tied to one place or one season. He is the One who is, and who therefore can be trusted to do what He promises.

This is why the name YHWH is so often called the covenant name. At the bush God ties the name to His promises to the patriarchs and to His pledge to deliver Israel. From this point on, whenever the Old Testament uses the name YHWH, it is reaching back to this moment of rescue and faithfulness. The name is not abstract philosophy about being. It is the name of a Saviour who hears the cry of slaves and comes down to set them free.

Why our English Bibles print LORD instead of YHWH

If you open an English Bible you will rarely see the letters YHWH on the page. Instead you meet the word LORD in small capitals, and this is a deliberate signal. Translators of the ESV, following a long tradition, render the personal name YHWH as LORD in capitals, while the ordinary title Adonai is printed as Lord with only the first letter capitalised. When you see GOD in capitals, that usually marks a place where the Hebrew pairs Adonai with YHWH and printing LORD twice would be clumsy.

This practice grew out of Jewish reverence. Over time the people stopped pronouncing the name YHWH aloud, fearing they might dishonour it or break the command against taking the name in vain. When a reader reached the four letters in the synagogue, he would say Adonai instead. The translators of the ancient Greek version, the Septuagint, followed suit and used the Greek word for Lord, Kyrios, and the New Testament writers continued that pattern. So the English LORD in small capitals carries a long history of a people handling the name YHWH with care rather than carelessness.

There is a small loss in this. A reader who does not know the convention can miss that the same divine name lies behind thousands of verses. Once you do know it, you can read passages such as the great confession of Deuteronomy 6:4, Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one, and recognise that the personal name YHWH is being pressed home. The faith of Israel rests on this one named God, not on a vague higher power.

What the name YHWH tells us about the character of God

Names in the ancient world said something true about the one who carried them, and the name YHWH is the richest example in all of Scripture. Because it speaks of the One who simply is, it grounds every other thing the Bible says about God. His faithfulness flows from it, since the God who depends on nothing cannot fail or fade. His unchanging steadiness flows from it too, for the One who is cannot become something He was not. When God later tells Israel, I the LORD do not change, He is unpacking what was already hidden in the name YHWH.

The name also shapes how we read God’s holiness. When the prophets thunder against idols, the point is that the idols were made, while the name YHWH belongs to the One who makes. An idol is a thing fashioned by hands and given a name by men. The God of the name YHWH gave Himself His own name and answers to no one. This is why taking the name in vain is treated so seriously in the commandments, because the name represents the very person and reputation of the living God.

There is warmth here as well as majesty. The God of the name YHWH binds Himself by promise to a people who could give Him nothing. He reveals the meaning of His name not in a lecture hall but in the act of rescuing slaves. Anyone wanting to think further about how the different perfections of God hold together will find help in the discussion of how God’s attributes relate to one another, since the name YHWH stands behind them all.

How Israel guarded the name, and where Jehovah came from

Because the name YHWH was no longer spoken, the actual vowels that once accompanied the four consonants were not passed down with certainty. When the Masoretes added vowel points to the Hebrew text, they attached to the four letters the vowels of the word Adonai, as a reminder to the reader to say Adonai rather than attempt the holy name. This was a cue for the eye, not a guide to pronunciation.

Centuries later, readers who did not understand this practice combined the consonants of the name YHWH with the borrowed vowels of Adonai and produced the form Jehovah. That is how the word Jehovah entered English hymns and older translations. It is best understood as a hybrid rather than the original sound of the name. Most scholars today reconstruct the pronunciation as Yahweh, though a measure of humility is right here, since the older reverence has left us without full certainty. What matters for faith is not that we recover the exact sound but that we honour the One the name YHWH belongs to.

This careful handling of the name YHWH is a quiet rebuke to a casual age. Israel would not toss the name about lightly, and that instinct guarded something precious. We are not bound by their particular custom, since the New Testament freely names and worships God, yet the reverence behind it is worth recovering whenever we speak of God or pray.

The name YHWH and the coming of Jesus

The name YHWH does not stay locked in the Old Testament. The God who appears and speaks throughout those pages, often as the mysterious figure called the Angel of the LORD, is repeatedly identified with YHWH Himself while also being distinct from Him. Readers who want to follow that thread will find it explored in the study of who the Angel of the LORD is, which presents these appearances as the pre-incarnate Jesus stepping into history before His birth in Bethlehem.

When Jesus came, He spoke in a way that pressed this name onto Himself. In John’s Gospel He says, Before Abraham was, I am, and His hearers picked up stones, because they understood Him to be claiming the name and being of YHWH, the I AM of the burning bush. Jesus did not say, Before Abraham was, I was. He used the present tense of eternal existence, the very language the name YHWH carries. The early believers then took the Greek word Kyrios, the word the Septuagint used for the name YHWH, and applied it to Jesus, confessing Jesus as Lord.

This is why the doctrine of the Trinity is no late invention. The seeds lie in the Old Testament use of the name YHWH, where the one God speaks and acts in ways that point beyond a flat oneness. The connection between the divine name and the triune God is drawn out further in the studies of whether the Trinity is found in the Old Testament and the doctrine of the Trinity itself. The name YHWH, far from being a relic, runs straight through to the worship of Jesus.

The personal name also stands behind the cluster of compound names such as El Shaddai and El Elyon, and it travels alongside the titles studied in the companion articles on the name Elohim and the name Adonai. Each of these throws its own light, yet the name YHWH remains the personal, covenant name at the centre.

The name YHWH and the worship of Israel

Once you begin to notice the name YHWH, you find it shaping the songs and prayers of the Old Testament from end to end. The psalmists call on it when they are afraid, lean on it when they give thanks, and lift it high when they gather to worship. To bless the LORD, in their language, was to bless the One whose personal name had been entrusted to them at the bush and again at Sinai. The prophets open their messages with the words, Thus says the LORD, so that every oracle carries the weight of the God who is. Israel did not worship an unknown power. They worshipped a God who had told them His name and bound Himself to them by it.

This shaped how the whole nation understood itself. They were the people who knew the name when the surrounding peoples did not. Their festivals, their sacrifices and their law all rested on the fact that the living God had drawn near and made Himself known. When they wandered into idolatry, the prophets did not accuse them of forgetting religion in general. They accused them of forsaking the One who had revealed His own name and rescued them from Egypt. The long drama of the Old Testament turns on whether Israel will honour the God who told them who He is, or trade Him for the lifeless gods of their neighbours.

That same calling now reaches the church, which worships the God of Abraham through Jesus. We are not left guessing at the character of the One we adore, because He has spoken and named Himself, and the One who bears that name has proved faithful in every generation that has trusted Him.

So, now what?

Learning what the name YHWH means is not an exercise for specialists. It changes the way you read your Bible, because now every LORD in small capitals lights up. You are no longer reading about a generic deity but about the One who is, the God who came down to rescue and who keeps every word He speaks. When trouble presses in and promises feel thin, the name YHWH reminds you that the One who made them does not change and cannot fail.

It changes prayer as well. To pray to the God whose name is YHWH is to come to the self-existent Lord who needs nothing from you and yet welcomes you because He has bound Himself by covenant. You are not flattering a distant power in the hope of a favour. You are speaking to the great I AM who has revealed His own name so that you might call on Him with confidence.

And it draws you to Jesus. The same name that Moses heard at the bush is the name the Saviour took upon Himself when He said, Before Abraham was, I am. To know the name YHWH and then to meet Jesus is to find that the God of the burning bush has a face, a voice and a cross. The reverence Israel gave to the four letters now belongs, fully and rightly, to the Lord Jesus.

“God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:14

For Further Study

Readers wanting to dig deeper will be helped by the treatment of the divine names in Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology and in Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology, both of which handle the name YHWH within a clear evangelical and dispensational frame. J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord touch on the covenant name in their writing on God’s dealings with Israel, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology offers a careful survey of the meaning of the divine names and their bearing on the doctrine of God.