Tetragrammaton
The Tetragrammaton is the four-letter Hebrew-language theonym , 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 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 is now almost universally accepted among Biblical and Semitic linguistics scholars, though the vocalization Jehovah continues to have wide usage, especially 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 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 or in prayer, or in everyday speech.
Four letters
The letters, properly written and read from right to left, are:| Hebrew | Letter name | Pronunciation |
| Yod | ||
| He | ||
| Waw | , or placeholder for "O"/"U" vowel | |
| He |
Etymology
The Hebrew Bible explains it by the formula אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14. This would frame Y-H-W-H as an imperfective aspect of the Hebrew triconsonantal root , "to be, become, come to pass", with a third person masculine prefix, equivalent to English "he", 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 —itself an archaic doublet of —with the final form eliciting similar translations as 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
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. Hebrew letters used to indicate vowels are known as or matres lectionis. 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, between 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 differed from that indicated by the consonants of the written text, 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 , or, if the previous or next word already was Adonai, as "Elohim".
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 , 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 , which is Aramaic for "the Name".
Yahweh
The scholarly consensus is that the original pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton was Yahweh. 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" ; non-Jews later combined the vowels of Adonai with the consonants of the Tetragrammaton and invented the name "Jehovah". Paul Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka state: "The Qere is the Lord, whilst the Ktiv is probably ", and they add: "Note 1: In our translations, we have used Yahweh, a form widely accepted by scholars, instead of the traditional Jehovah." In 1869, Smith's Bible Dictionary, a collaborative work of noted scholars of the time, declared: "Whatever, therefore, be the true pronunciation of the word, there can be little doubt that it is not Jehovah." Mark P. Arnold remarks that certain conclusions drawn from the pronunciation of as "Yahweh" would be valid even if the scholarly consensus were not correct. Thomas Römer holds that "the original pronunciation of Yhwh was 'Yahô' or 'Yahû. Max Reisel, in The Mysterious Name of YHWH, says that the "vocalisation of the Tetragrammaton must originally have been YeHūàH or YaHūàH".The element yahwi- is found in Amorite personal names, 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 epithet from El to Yahweh. But 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. Hillel Ben-Sasson states 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". Frank Moore Cross says: "It must be emphasized that the Amorite verbal form is of interest only in attempting to reconstruct the proto-Hebrew or South Canaanite verbal form used in the name Yahweh. We should argue vigorously against attempts to take Amorite yahwi and yahu as divine epithets."
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, known as Drusius; Sixtinus Amama ; Louis Cappel ; Johannes Buxtorf ; Jacob Alting. Defending "Jehovah" were writings by Nicholas Fuller and Thomas Gataker and three essays by Johann Leusden. 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.
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 /Yahoh 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 and Johann Friedrich von Meyer, 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 like the Samaritans."
Non-biblical texts
Texts with Tetragrammaton
Current overviews begin with the Egyptian epigraphy. A hieroglyphic inscription of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III at Soleb mentions a group of Shasu whom it calls "the Shasu of Yhwꜣ". James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson suggested that the Amenhotep III inscription may indicate that worship of Yahweh originated in an area to the southeast of Israel. A later inscription from the time of Ramesses II in West Amara associates the Shasu nomads with S-rr, interpreted as Mount Seir, spoken of in some texts as where Yahweh comes from. Egyptologist Thomas Schneider argued for the existence of a theophoric name in a Book of the Dead papyrus dating to the late 18th or early 19th dynasty which he translated as adōnī-rō'ē-yāh, meaning "My lord is the shepherd of Yah".File:YHWH on Mesha Stele.jpg|thumb|The Mesha Stele bears a reference to the Israelite god Yahweh.
The Mesha Stele, dated to 840 BCE, mentions the Israelite god Yahweh. Roughly contemporary pottery sherds and plaster inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud mention "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah". A tomb inscription at Khirbet el-Qom also mentions Yahweh. Dated slightly later there are an ostracon from the collections of Shlomo Moussaieff, and two tiny silver amulet scrolls found at Ketef Hinnom that mention Yahweh. Also a wall inscription, dated to the late 6th century BCE, with mention of Yahweh had been found in a tomb at Khirbet Beit Lei.
Yahweh is mentioned also in the Lachish letters and the slightly earlier Tel Arad ostraca, and on a stone from Mount Gerizim.