@ 2021-12-23: "THIS IS MY NAME FOREVER..." (EXODUS 3:15)

@ 2021-12-23: "THIS IS MY NAME FOREVER..." (EXODUS 3:15)

[Updated 2022-12-21] 

How important is it that we know, remember, and use God’s primary personal name in Hebrew? Can we even know what it is? Was its pronunciation lost? Was it preserved openly in the Hebrew Masoretic Text? Did the editors of the King James Version know the correct pronunciation and use it? Is the correct pronunciation Yahweh—or even (for example) Yahuwah? Or is the true pronunciation of God’s Oldest Name something else entirely—something that has been hidden for 1,900 years, even from most Hebrew scholars, and revealed to those with eyes to see in these “end times”?

No doubt the Name in Hebrew is of utmost importance, for God says so. “Moreover God [‘Elohim (אֱלֹהִים)] said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: “The Lord [Yhwh (יְהוָֹה), read as ‘Adonay (אֲדֹנָי)] 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, and this is My memorial[1] to all generations”’” (Exodus 3:15, NKJV). The ESV and other versions say, “and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”

Consider such verses as Psalms 20:7, 97:12, 119:55, and Malachi 3:16 (the list of verses is not exhaustive). We are to remember—and even to meditate—on God’s Name. How can we do that, if we do not even know what it is—or at the very least, what it means in whatever language we speak? 

The Meaning of Yhwh Was Never Lost 

Certainly, the meaning of Yhwh was never lost. “Then Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba, and there called on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God [‘El `olam (אֵל עוֹלָם)]” (Genesis 21:33). Abraham did not know God merely (so to speak) as “God Almighty”, no more than Isaac and Jacob did. They knew and used His Oldest Personal Name—Yhwh—just as people did long before Noah’s Flood overtook the world (Genesis 4:1; 4:26).[2]

As late as when the Book of Revelation was written—by which time the Jews consistently used circumlocutions such as “Lord” [Hebrew ‘Adonay (אֲדֹנָי), Greek Kurios (Κύριος)] and “God” [Hebrew ‘Elohim (אֱלֹהִים), Greek Theos (θεός)] for Yhwh—Jews and Christians alike still remembered the meaning of Yhwh. “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come!” (Revelation 4:8). This is the One “who lives forever and ever” (verse 9).

Without dwelling on the fine points of John’s Greek text, let us note that John consistently wrote Greek as if it were Hebrew—using Hebrew-like syntax (as far as Greek allows) and Greek translations of Hebrew vocabulary. In Hebrew, the above clauses in verse 8 would read: 

Qadosh, qadosh, qadosh, ‘Adonay ‘Elohey Ts^eva’ot, hayah w^ehoweh w^eyavo’[3] 

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts, Who was and is and is to come![4] 

More literal is the rabbinic paraphrase of Yhwh: hayah w^ehoweh w^eyihyeh (הָיָה וְהֹוֶה וְיִהְיֶה), “He who was, and is, and will be”. God’s own paraphrase of Yhwh is the famous ‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה): “I am that I am”, with the grammatically imperfect tense-aspect showing a continuing action (Exodus 3:14).

But my point here is that the meaning of Yhwh was known even to John. He simply used one of the standard Jewish circumlocutions—“Lord”—to represent the Name. He—or rather, the four living creatures in John’s vision—then translated the meaning of that holiest of personal names. John then added the divine attribute of possessing everlasting life. 

A Good English Paraphrase of Yhwh 

A good one-word English paraphrase of Yhwh is “Eternal”, or in proper terms, “the Eternal”. And indeed, “the Eternal lives (forever)” [Yhwh hay (יהוה חי)]—as many verses show—but the Bible never says, “the Ever-Living One is eternal”! “The Ever-Living One” is not a correct translation or paraphrase of Yhwh! Why does this matter? Because Yhwh denotes God’s fundamental state of being (Deuteronomy 6:4): among other things, He who is uncreated and who exists outside of physical space, time, matter, and energy.

But “everlasting life” is an attribute of God, which He also has given and will give to created beings: to angels (including the demons who rebelled against Him), and to His spiritual children in the resurrection of the just. “Everlasting life”, in both Hebrew and Greek, does not demand that said life has no beginning—it simply denotes that it has no end. But it may also have no beginning, as in the case of the uncreated Eternal God alone. Do you see the distinction?

Once more, then, “the Eternal” or “the Eternal God” are good English paraphrases of Yhwh or Yhwh ‘Elohim, respectively. If we wanted to mean, “the Ever-Living God”, who “has neither beginning of days nor end of life”, we would have to say something different: ‘Elohim hayyim (אֱלֹהִים חַיִּים), as in Deuteronomy 5:26.[5]

We know perfectly well, then, what the Hebrew words behind “the Eternal God” mean. But can we know how Yhwh was pronounced in antiquity? 

Is Yhwh Too Sacred to be Pronounced? 

Many today—especially among Orthodox Jews—believe that Yhwh is too sacred to be pronounced. Many of these use ha-Shem (“the Name”) as a substitute. Some even use circumlocutions of circumlocutions (e.g., Adoshem and ‘Eloqim) to avoid the slightest chance of using His Name in a frivolous or blasphemous context—in a well-meaning attempt to keep the Third Commandment.

This practice has deeper historical roots than some professing Christians today want to admit. Let me quote extensively from a published article[6] I wrote on this subject: 

The Greek New Testament preserves (in translation) the [then-]current Jewish circumlocutions for the Tetragrammaton [in Hebrew, Yhwh or (יהוה)]. By Jesus’ day, the Jews already considered the name Yhwh too sacred to be pronounced outside the Temple. Wherever Yhwh was written in a Hebrew text, the reader substituted another divine name in its place. Usually, the divine name used was Adonay [or “Lord”]. Elohim [or “God”] was used when Adonay… preceded Yhwh in writing. All “mainstream” Greek Septuagint manuscripts, other Hellenistic Jewish texts, and the Greek New Testament translate Yhwh and Elohim as Kyrios (Κύριος) and Theos (θεός), which likewise mean “Lord” and “God.”

Thus, when Jesus read Isaiah 61:1–2 in the synagogue of Nazareth, He read Adonay Elohim (not Adonay Yhwh) in verse 1 and Adonay (not Yhwh) in verse 2. Luke (citing the Septuagint) translated Jesus’ reading of Adonay in both cases as Kyrios (Luke 4:16–22). Had Jesus not followed this convention, He would immediately have been accused of blasphemy under Jewish law. Likewise, when Jesus cited Hebrew Scripture publicly, and when the apostles cited it in preaching and writing, they always used circumlocutions for Yhwh—never Yhwh itself. Again, the New Testament accurately records this fact. Had the apostles (including Paul) not done so, they would have aroused tremendous controversy among the Jews and Christ’s disciples alike. The New Testament is silent about any such controversy. This matter was simply a non-issue in the original Church.

Why was this so? Because in following the Jewish convention, Jesus and the apostles were breaking no law of God. Here Jewish law was extending biblical precedent, in which Abraham (Genesis 18:27, 30, 31–32), Moses (Exodus 4:10, 13), Daniel (Daniel 9:7–8, 15, 17, 19), and others used Adonay or Elohim as if it were Yhwh (that is, as a substitute out of respect for God’s personal name). These precedents were not inserted by early scribes so that God’s name might not be profaned, as the medieval Talmudists and Masoretes thought. Had the early scribes sought to do so, they should also have made similar changes in many other places (quite frequently in the same contexts where the alleged changes were made). The Jewish law, then, was not arbitrary—but was based on genuine biblical example.

Far from breaking the intent of the Third Commandment, as some charge, this judgment on God’s Law (cf. Matthew 23:1–2) was meant to help the common people keep it. This worked [while] the Second Temple was still standing, because the original pronunciation of Yhwh was repeated in the Temple service every year on the Day of Atonement. It was only after the fall of [Second Temple Jerusalem] that the exact pronunciation of Yhwh was lost [but as we shall see, only in practice, not in divinely revealed fact]. Even the Hebrew Masoretic Text, while it preserves the ancient circumlocutions used for Yhwh, does not openly state the original pronunciation of Yhwh. The meaning of Yhwh was never lost, however (cf. Genesis 21:33; Exodus 3:14; Revelation 4:8).

Some few fragments of the Greek Septuagint insert Yhwh in archaic Hebrew characters among the Greek words. For that matter, many of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Hebrew use the “square script” still used today but spell out Yhwh in archaic Hebrew characters. In both cases, Yhwh is obviously being given special attention. But this does not prove that the readers of these texts pronounced Yhwh aloud. On the contrary, specialists concur that Yhwh was so written to mark the name as holy while reminding the reader not to pronounce it. The conventions of the Masoretic Text serve a similar function. Yhwh is written out in the normal square script, but most of the vowel-points for Adonay or Elohim are attached to it. These remind the reader not to try to pronounce Yhwh as written, but rather as Adonay or Elohim—just as in Jesus’ day and long before.

The point is that, even if one could prove that the New Testament (in Hebrew, Aramaic or even Greek) originally spelled out Yhwh in Hebrew characters, this would not prove that the early Christians pronounced Yhwh—in fact, quite the contrary. Rather, when the Greek New Testament translates Yhwh as Kyrios (or Theos), it accurately reflects the reading tradition that Jesus and the apostles respected. So, not only is there nothing wrong with substituting Adonay (or Elohim) for Yhwh in Hebrew, but there is nothing wrong with then translating Adonay and Elohim as Kyrios and Theos in Greek (or as “Lord” and “God” in whatever other language). 

How does the Hebrew Masoretic Text reflect these ancient circumlocutions? Many manuscripts and nearly all printed editions normally “point” Yhwh (יהוה) as (יְהוָֹה), instructing the reader thereby to read ‘Adonay (“Lord”). But MS. Leningrad B-19a and the BHS printed edition read (יְהוָה) in such cases, apparently to instruct the reader to pronounce the name as sh^ema’ (שְׁמָא), the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew word ha-Shem (הַשֶּׁם). Both substitutions mean “the Name”.

In nearly all manuscripts and printed editions, when Yhwh follows ‘Adonay, it is pointed differently: (יְהוִֹה). In MS. B-19a and the BHS, the pointing is (יְהוִה). Either way, this reminds the reader to pronounce Yhwh as ‘Elohim (אֱלֹהִים)—that is, “God”. The KJV, the NKJV, and many other English versions reflect this custom. So, when one sees in these versions “Lord” or “God”, Yhwh is found in the underlying Hebrew.[7] 

Educated (and Not-So-Educated) Guesswork 

How then did Jehovah—as in the KJV on occasion (Exodus 6:3; Psalms 83:18; Isaiah 12:2; 26:4, which has “in the Lord Jehovah”[8])—arise in translation? Essentially, because professing Christians who did not understand the Masoretic “reading tradition” read Yhwh “as written”—even though the vowel-pointing is inherently nonsensical according to both the usual rules of pointing and (far more importantly) the strict and consistent rules of Hebrew grammar.[9] From the resulting mishmash—Y^ehowah, with the substitution of “j” for “y” and “v” for “w”—Jehovah arose in English.

Now, some argue that “Jehovah” has some special merit. They want to believe (it seems quite often) that the King James editors had some special knowledge—even some special divine inspiration—and therefore could not possibly be wrong as to how Yhwh is to be pronounced. What nonsense! Why then is Yhwh often pointed in a way which—by following the same procedure of pronunciation—would be pronounced Y^ehowih or “Jehovih”? Even Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary points out that these would be the results of such improper modes of pronunciation.

No one I know of claims that “Jehovih” even “makes the first cut” as to the original pronunciation of Yhwh. A recent proposal which has enchanted many people—Yahuwah—is even worse in its way. It has no meaning at all in Hebrew grammar, even as it “pretends” to do so. To accept this pronunciation is to deny the validity and authority of the entirety of Masoretic Hebrew grammar, accentuation, and resulting pronunciation. Yahuwah introduces chaos into the history and structure of Biblical Hebrew as such, in the one place where clarity absolutely is demanded!

Let us get our facts straight once and for all! We can only do so if we accept the Hebrew Masoretic Text as what it is: the heir of the priestly reading tradition of late Second Temple times, having unique authority and inspiration in its systematic foundation and having high accuracy in its details.

Yhwh derives from the verb root hawah (הוה), which is an older form of hayah (היה): “fall out, come to pass, become, be”. Both verb roots end in the consonant he (ה), but originally, they ended in the semi-consonant yod (י), which marked the presence of a final vowel.[10] Such verb roots which also have the middle semi-consonant waw (ו)—that is, acting as a consonant—are rather common in Biblical Hebrew. We know how such verbs are conjugated.

In theory, there are seven common possible ways hawah (הוה) could be conjugated, in the 3^rd person imperfect masculine singular form. Biblical Hebrew (as opposed to Modern Hebrew generally) has a surprising number of rare conjugations, but many of them are equivalent to the Pi`el stem anyway and none of them appear to be relevant to our subject here (even in the resulting spellings and pronunciations).

Taking the roots hayah (היה) and qawah (קוה) (among others) as our models, let us consider the possible forms, while also spelling out the Hebrew originals.[11] They are: 

Pa`al/Qal               yih^eweh (יִהְוֶה)

(Simple)

Nif`al                     yihaweh (יִהָוֶה)

(Reflexive, Passive)

Pi`el                       y^ehawweh (יְהַוֶּה)

(Intensive)

Pu`al                      y^ehuwweh (יְהֻוֶּה)

(Intensive Passive)

Hif`il                      yah^eweh (יַהְוֶה)

(Causitive)

Huf`al                    yah^eweh (יָהְוֶה)

(Causitive Passive)

Hitpa`el                 yith^ehawweh (יִתְהַוֶּה)

(Reflexive-Passive)

We can rule out the Hitpa`el stem due to its spelling. We can rule out the reflexive or passive stem, Nif`al, even though it has three syllables. We can rule out the Hif`il and Huf`al stems because they have only two syllables each. We can rule out the three-syllable Pu`al stem because it would make God out to be a created being. Only one possibility is left: the Pi`el stem, the intensive (Y^ehawweh).

Hebrew scholars have accepted Yahweh because they refuse to trust the Hebrew Masoretic Text—with its vowels, and particularly with its accents—as either ancient and authoritative or divinely inspired. They believe the vowel-points and the accents are a medieval invention. They are not. The accents demonstrably are as old as the written verbal text and were created and transmitted by the same ancient authors—and so share in the same divine inspiration as the words they mark.[12] The same is true of the vowel-pointing as a system, one way or another. Both accents and vowels first arose in orally taught[13] forms, to be sure—yet both must have existed as complementary written systems no later than the time of Ezra[14] (which, by the way, is what both Orthodox Jewish and Masoretic traditions long have maintained).

Quoting from my article[15] again, let us see what “educated guesswork”—taking Greek and Aramaic sources (among others) rather than Masoretic Hebrew sources as the base, with prefixes and suffixes found in certain Biblical Hebrew names only as an afterthought—led to the adoption of Yahweh as the “most probable” pronunciation of God’s Oldest Personal Name:[16] 

Modern scholars (working largely on extra-biblical evidence) generally accept Yahweh (or something close to it) as the original pronunciation. According to the Oxford Bible, “Christian writers between A.D. 150 and A.D. 450 have Yaoua… in Greek characters [Iaoua], and early magical texts have Yhbyh (Yahveh) [sic] in Aramaic characters, all pointing to Yahweh as the original pronunciation.” Likewise, the Revised Standard Version argues that “it is almost quite certain that the name was originally pronounced ‘Yahweh’.” The Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-Aramaic Lexicon also favors Yahweh (with Yahaweh given as an alternative), citing as part of its evidence the Greek transliteration Iabe given by the early Catholic commentators Theodoret and Epiphanius. (Iaue is also known from early Greek sources.)

Extra-biblical Aramaic and Greek texts, however, cannot completely settle this question. In the Aramaic letters from Elephantine (5th century B.C.), the normal spelling is Yhwh or even Yhw.[17] Not even Yhbyh (with b substituting for w as a consonant and the second y marking the presence of a vowel), as found in magical texts where the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton was part of the charm, can absolutely prove how Yhwh was pronounced in Hebrew…. Even given that the name is active rather than [passive] in its verb stem, Yhwh in Hebrew may be pronounced in [only] three ways [we need consider here]: Yahweh, [Y^ehuwweh], or… Y^ehawweh ([the latter two] as proposed by Abraham S. Halkin in his out-of-print 201 Hebrew Verbs). The Aramaic Yhw, Yhwh and Yhbyh, and the Greek Iabe and Iaue, could have come from [either Yahweh or Y^ehawweh]. (Iaoua may be explained as an independent attempt to pronounce Yhwh as Yahwah or [more likely, Yahuwah—again, neither option makes sense in the Masoretic reading tradition].)

Only Yehawweh [fits all the] biblical and extra-biblical evidence. This includes the derivation of Yhwh from [an older form of] the root hayah, “to be” (Exodus 3:14–15), the explanations of its actual meaning (Genesis 21:33; Revelation 4:8; etc.), its use as the prefixes Y^eho-, Yo- and Ye- and the suffixes –yah and –yahu in compound personal names, its common “short form” [Yahh], and the received grammar of Masoretic Hebrew. The latter includes not only the vowel-points, but the accent notation, which indicates the primary and secondary stresses and the number and kind of syllables used in a word (e.g., Psalm 96:10, which demands [among other important, and musical, things beyond our study here] that Yhwh have three, not two syllables). 

Yahweh (again, as we have seen above) is ruled out entirely, as it has only two syllables. Y^ehuwweh insinuates that God is a created being. The only other possibility is Y^ehawweh. A parallel set of forms in Mishnaic Hebrew (based on hayah rather than on hawah) points to the intent: Y^ehawweh is the Eternal Creator God. 

Holy and Awesome Is His Name! 

The very sound of Y^ehawweh is consistent with a “back-formation” into Hebrew grammar of the one and only series of vowels which—when sung in “overtone chanting”, as by Jill Purce of the UK—generates the complete “harmonic series” of frequencies which can be generated by a single tone. In turn, this series represents to the ear what the Jewish mathematician Stan Tenan maintains is the mathematical representation[18] of the creation of the physical universe—what astronomer Fred Hoyle maintains (on physical and mathematical grounds) is inappropriately called the “Big Bang”. The “sound of creation” (if you will) would be more like the poetic “Lost Chord”—if Tenan is right.

Y^ehawweh might well have been the very first word Adam heard, when the Creator introduced Himself. Perhaps the whole Semitic root system derives from a back-formation of His Name into the root hawah. This would explain much about the personal names found in the biblical chronologies before the Flood, which are Semitic in form without necessarily being Hebrew in fact.

But consider what all this means. Y^ehawweh is the most “onomatopoeic” word in any known human language. The sound represents the meaning, in a way no other combination of sounds could do. No wonder some, even without knowing this, get “hung up” on finding the “correct pronunciation” of God’s holy and awesome Name (Psalms 111:9, NKJV)!

But as we have seen, the biblical authors—even Moses, David, and Daniel, let alone the New Testament authors and Jesus Himself—had no trouble using either translations or circumlocutions for that Name. Everybody in Jesus’ day and well beyond—at least among those who heard and respected the priestly reading tradition—knew perfectly well not only what the Name meant, but how it sounded. The pronunciation was never lost—yet it was kept hidden, in later times, right before our eyes, and despite the Jews if necessary (cf. Romans 3:1-4).

In later essays, I hope to discuss further just how holy and awesome Y^ehawweh is—whether as such or as expressed in other languages. It is a fascinating and edifying study! 

John Wheeler (יוֹחָנָ֗ן רַ֫כָּ֥ב)

---

[1] The Hebrew word translated “My memorial” is [zikhri (זִכְרִי)]. “Thus I am to be remembered” is a paraphrase of the concept, but the original Hebrew goes well beyond this. It is not enough that we remember His Name as such, but also what it stands for—something difficult if not impossible to translate into one English word.

[2] Exodus 6:3 is mistranslated by nearly everyone. Let us look at the facts of the case. “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty [b^e’el shadday (בְּאֵל שַׁדָּי)], but by My name Lord [Yhwh (יהוה)] I was not known to them.” First, the Patriarchs used Yhwh far, far more often than ‘El Shadday—as, indeed, did Yhwh Himself when speaking to them! Second, “by My name” adds something to the Hebrew which the Hebrew does not say. The last two clauses should be translated as a rhetorical question: “and was I not known to them by My name Yhwh?” The margin of some few modern versions offers this as an alternative rendering. The Masoretic accents—the age and meaning of which likewise were lost for 1,900 years—show that this indeed is the correct translation. Finally, the idea of a question is implied in the very next verse—by the word “and also” [w^egam (וְגַם)].

[3] The above comes from the Hebrew New Testament versions by Delitzsch and by Salkinson and Ginsburg. For some reason, I cannot get the Hebrew text to display correctly on Blogspot, although I can in MS Word.

[4] Cf. the Hebrew of Isaiah 6:3.

[5] It is rather surprising that most of us have not seen this simple fact of Hebrew idiom sooner, from the English versions alone.

[6] John Wheeler, “God’s Names and the Jewish Reading Tradition”, in Living Church News, September October 2005, pp. 13-14, 20. The citation is from pp. 13-14.

[7] We leave aside here the occasional translation of Yahh (יָהּ) by “Lord”.

[8] The original Hebrew is b^e-Yahh Yhwh (בְּיָהּ יְהוָה), with Yhwh pointed as a reminder to say ‘Adonay. Here the pointing is after the fashion of the BHS, being a direct quote.

[9] The BDBG Lexicon (p. 218a) claims the earliest scholar to make this mistake was Galatinus (A.D. 1520). The HALOT Lexicon (Vol. 1, p. 395a) cites an even earlier, anonymous reference (A.D. 1381).

[10] In the stems, because either of the final semi-consonants marked the presence of a vowel, historically it could be omitted in written texts. In the HMT, the final semi-consonant always is present.

[11] We do not seem to have the possibility of irregular conjugations for hawah—at least for those forms we need to consider!

[12] The proof lies in the decipherment of the accents by the late Suzanne Haik-Vantoura (The Music of the Bible Revealed), which unfortunately is largely out of print (book, recordings, scores, and commentaries—but see my YouTube channel and other online references). Is it coincidence that SHV started the process in earnest in 1970, 1,900 years or 100 Hebrew calendrical time cycles after the fall of Second Temple Jerusalem, when the Levitical “biblical chant” was lost in practice?

[13] The accents specifically arose in a series of gestures performed by both hands: in a musical cheironomy.

[14] The basis for this inference is beyond our present study. Let us say simply that the Masorete Moshe ben Asher (fl. 895 CE) ascribed the origin of the accents to “the Elders of Bathyra” (the priestly Boethusians of Second Temple times) and of the accents and vowels together to “the community of Prophets”. (Kahle thinks these were the Karaites, the heirs of the Boethusians—but why not the Boethusians, themselves called “the heirs of the prophets, who possess knowledge of understanding” in biblical and especially accentual exegesis?)

[15] Wheeler, op. cit., p. 14.

[16] I did not know—when I wrote the original article—all that I know now about Hebrew grammar. Here I have corrected errors in my original exposition.

[17] Recently this spelling was found in the purported oldest example of the Name in inscriptions, on Mt. Ebal. The spelling is [Yhw (יהו)], yet still would have Ye-ha-wwe as being quite plausible. The original letter marking the presence of a vowel, yod (י), would have been left off, just as he (ה) was left off in Aramaic much later. Ya-h^e-we still would have been ruled out not just by the grammar, but by the accentuation, which then would have been taught publicly as a series of gestures of the hands and fingers (much as Egypt and many other ancient cultures used to represent, to conduct, and to teach ancient “classical” music). For my reconstruction of the specific gestures used to conduct “biblical chant”, see here.

[18] We deal here with the ultimate “Fourier transform”.