יהוה YHWH — the personal name of the God of Israel

The four letters

יהוה — four Hebrew consonants: yod, he, waw, he. In English transliteration, Y-H-W-H (older transliterations use J for yod and V for waw, giving J-H-V-H or J-H-W-H — these reflect older transliteration conventions, not different Hebrew letters).

The name appears approximately 6,828 times in the Masoretic Text — more than any other proper noun in the Hebrew Bible. It is the standard way the text refers to God in narrative, prophecy, and direct address. “And YHWH said to Moses…” opens dozens of passages.

The name is given to Moses at the burning bush:

God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites: YHWH, 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, and this is My memorial-name from generation to generation.” (Exodus 3:15, BSB adapted to show the underlying Hebrew)

In Exodus 3:14, immediately before this, God identifies himself as ehyeh asher ehyeh (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה) — “I AM WHO I AM” (or “I will be who I will be” — the Hebrew verb covers both tenses). The connection between ehyeh (first-person form) and YHWH (third-person form, plausibly) is widely accepted; the precise grammatical relationship is debated.

Why we don’t know how it sounds

The Hebrew alphabet writes consonants only. Vowels — pronounced as part of every word — were not part of the original written text. Readers supplied them from oral tradition.

By the late Second Temple period (1st century BC – 1st century CE), Jewish practice was already to not pronounce the divine name. The Septuagint (the Greek translation produced in the 3rd–2nd century BC) renders YHWH as kyrios (κύριος, “lord”) — the same substitution practice. The Mishnah (Yoma 6:2) records that in the Temple, only the High Priest pronounced the name, on Yom Kippur, once a year.

When the Masoretes (Jewish scribes, 6th–10th centuries CE) added vowel pointing to the Hebrew text to preserve correct reading, they faced a problem: the divine name was not to be pronounced. Their solution — the qere/ketiv system — wrote the consonants of YHWH but added the vowels of Adonai (אֲדֹנָי, “my Lord”) to remind the reader to say “Adonai” instead of the divine name. In passages where the underlying Hebrew already has “Adonai YHWH” — to avoid the redundant “Adonai Adonai” — the vowels of Elohim (“God”) were substituted, signalling “say Elohim here.”

This created a Hebrew text in which the divine name’s consonants and the substitute word’s vowels appear together. When read mechanically as a Latin-alphabet word — ignoring the qere/ketiv system — the result is “Jehovah” (Y + the vowels of A-do-na-i = Y-a-(h)-o-(a) = “Yahowah” → Latinised “Jehovah”). This pronunciation was first proposed by Christian Hebraists in the 13th–16th centuries (most influentially by Petrus Galatinus in 1518) — it is not the original pronunciation, but a translation artifact.

Modern scholarship’s best reconstruction is “Yahweh” — based on Greek transliterations in early Christian sources (Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Clement of Alexandria), some Samaritan tradition, and the patterns of Hebrew verb morphology. The reconstruction is well-supported but not certain.

Why English Bibles use “the LORD”

The convention of rendering YHWH as “the LORD” in small capitals descends from the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. The Septuagint used kyrios (lord); the Vulgate used Dominus (lord). When William Tyndale produced the first major English Bible translation directly from Hebrew (1530s), he adopted the same convention — using “the LORD” in capitals for YHWH and “the Lord” in normal case for the Hebrew Adonai or the Greek Kyrios.

The KJV (1611) followed Tyndale. Most modern English translations (NIV, BSB, ESV, NLT, NRSV) maintain the convention. A few translations restore the name: the Jerusalem Bible uses “Yahweh”; Young’s Literal Translation uses “Jehovah” or “YHWH”; some Jewish translations (like the JPS Tanakh) use “Lord” in regular case to reflect the Jewish reading practice rather than the Hebrew written name.

The result is that the most-used English Bibles do not represent the Hebrew specifically — the personal name of God in 6,828 instances is rendered as a generic title. This is not a translation error; it is a translation convention that preserves Jewish reading practice. But it does mean that English readers are not exposed to what the Hebrew text actually distinguishes.

In the New Testament

The Greek New Testament has no instance of YHWH transliterated. When the NT quotes Old Testament passages that include the divine name, it uses kyrios (the Septuagint’s substitution). When the NT writers want to assert Jesus’s divinity, the most powerful and most distinctively Hebrew way to do so is to apply YHWH-passages from the OT to Jesus and use kyrios for both — preserving the linguistic ambiguity that allowed the same word to function as substitute for the divine name and as honorific for a person.

This is most striking in Philippians 2:9–11, which quotes Isaiah 45:23 (a YHWH-passage) and applies it to Jesus: “every knee should bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (kyrios).” The Greek word is kyrios — the same word that the LXX uses for YHWH. Whether the NT writer intends the YHWH-application is a question of New Testament theology; the linguistic mechanism is clear.

What the translation flattens

When a passage says “YHWH bless you and keep you; YHWH make His face shine on you” (Numbers 6:24–25), the Hebrew is using the personal divine name three times in two verses. The English “the LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make His face shine on you” preserves the same structure but loses the distinct personality of the name. In Hebrew, the priest is invoking a specific named God; in English, the priest is invoking a generic title.

The same effect applies across thousands of passages. The translation choice is reverent; it is also obscuring. QFB documents the underlying Hebrew without prescribing what readers should do with it.

Related reading

• The meaning of “I am the way, the truth, and the life” — the “I AM” sayings in John play on the same ehyeh tradition
• The Bible on Elijah — whose Hebrew name Eliyyahu means “My God is YHWH”