The Tetragrammaton

The use of the Divine Name in the Tanakh is pervasive, many English translations render it as “LORD” (in upper case).

Jer.16:21 “then you will know that my name is the LORD” (yad’u ki shemi YHWH)

Isaiah 42:8 “I am YHWH, that is my name”

and Ex.3:15 “YHWH… that is my name forever”

Those are the only three “my name is” quotes that I could find.

How the Divine Name is Unique

In the famous passage of the Burning Bush, Moses pleads “they (the Israelites) ask me “What is his name” What shall I say to them?” (v.3:13) The Israelites know the names of many gods, myriad as must have been the pantheons of old, beginning with the gods of the Egyptians themselves. However what they are given is not a combination of consonants in the human language, rather it is a meaning, and the meaning of everything “I AM WHO AM”.

Should it be in the future tense? I strongly feel it is not proper to translate this as “I will be who I will be” as in the future tense, since the tenses in the Hebrew language need to be translated in context, the language itself being tenseless. Thus when God goes on to say “I AM has sent you” (v.3:14b), a future translation would read “I WILL BE has sent you”, which sounds clunky, with the subject in the future tense and the verb in the past! Having said that “I will be what I will be” can also be seen as having its own theological significance and uniqueness, I’m not discounting that. However if there the Hebrew language is truly interpretable, then it is likely to be interpretable in one tense rather than two, and the present seems to be the more reasonable pick of the two. Further, there is one other problem with the use of the future tense in the Divine name, which is that it seems to leave open a possibility of mutability “I will be” could imply being something that one is not at present but “will be” in the future nevertheless. That would contradict verses that describe God as the unchanging in the same scripture and so could be seen as out of context for that reason.

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh”

The divine Name is ostensibly revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush incident when he asks “whom shall I say is sending me?” And God replies “I AM WHO I AM (ehyeh asher ehyeh)”. If we study the verb forms in play of the word “to be- hayah“- The 3rd person masculine singular Qal imperfect of is yihyeh “he is/ he will be”, rather than the 1st person Qal imperfect form used in Exodus 3:14 “ehyeh- I am/ I will be“. It is probably the closest form of the verb to Y’HWH- Y’HYH. It is also possibly that the middle waw (W) is the archaic form of the verb, HWH rather than HYH. This form seems also to be preserved in “Hawwah”, the name for Eve, where we again find the central waw.

As we will see later in Michael Heiser’s article he states that the waw was interchangeable with the yod in the proto-Semitic languages like old Aramaic, explaining the hwh instead of hyh. Consider that the waw in writing is merely an extended yod. He also states that the first vowel is always an “a” class vowel and this is pretty much set in stone what with the plenitude of “Yah” type theophoric names that we see in the Bible and I think there is also a verse where Ya is used instead of the full tetragrammaton. Considering this, he thinks the best translation of YHWH is in the Hifil (causative) voice, which would come out “I cause to be/exist”.

With regards to pronouncing the name he notes that in the entire Biblical age, there was certainly no prohibition existed. For example in the priestly blessing, the name is invoked. Or God himself is saying to Moses “tell them Yahweh has sent you”.

It is worthwhile noting that while in verse 15 states “Yahweh has sent you”, verse 14 states “I AM (ehyeh) has sent you”. This is fascinating because once again here, Yahweh is equated with I AM.

The 3rd person usage fits in with the numerous instances of the form “I am Yahweh” (eg. Ex. 6:2,6, several times in Ezekiel) where it the 1st person would sound cumbersome as “I am-I am who I am” in contrast with the 3rd person “I am He who is (yihyeh)”, or “I am he who is who he is”. This form also it fits better the usage in into verses like Exodus 6:2 “I am YHWH” or “I am He who is who He is”.

The Name of YHWH is given in the very next verse as the “I am who I am” in Exodus 3:15: “God also said to Moses: “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘YHWH, the God (Yahweh Elohim) of your ancestors, 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 my title for all generations.”

So “YHWH” is the Name, 3:14 “I AM WHO AM” and “I AM” are offered seemingly as explanation. In fact, “YHWH” occurs much prior to the Exodus account, in Genesis itself, eg. The conversation with Abraham. So the yod (Y) is essential an essential component of the divine Name, its not optional. The verbal forms in Ex.3:14 might lack it, precisely because they are verbal forms in manner of explanation rather than the proper noun usage.

Eliyah, Yehoshua (which is the precursor of Yeshua which comes into usage in the Second Temple period), Alleluiah, all have the yod. Thus Jesus, which is the Anglicised Hebrew Yeshua, and the Arabic derivative (which might have come to us via the Syriac Aramaic “Eisho”- rendered as “Eisa” in the Qur’an) contains the yod hey (YH) representing the Tetragrammaton YHWH considering they are all but abbreviations of Yehoshua.

Yehoshua itself stands for “Yah saves”; Eliyah- my God is “Yah”, Alleluiah- “Praise be to Yah”. Eliyah also passes into Qur’anic usage as Ilyas, once again likely through the Syrian Aramaic Elias.

Archaeological Evidence

Thus in the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the strong scriptural notion of God as Existence itself, a notion derived from Him stating his Name as a nominal form of the verb for existence. We stated that God is offering the “eh’yeh asher eh’yeh” as “explanation”, as a possible explanation as to why it differs from the consonantal form of the divine Name YHWH. The fact that God is Being itself is fundamental to Thomistic metaphysics (followed by Roman Catholics and also many other Christians). It would be beyond the scope of this discussion to go into a defence of that assertion. St. Thomas discusses this in Q.3 of Prima Pars of Summa Theologiae, and it is the subject of numerous Christian discussions on the Nature of God.

The earliest extra-biblical attestation to the full form of the Tetragrammaton  is found in the ninth century Moabite stone, line 18, in which Mesha, king of Moab, boasts that in carrying out the rite of herein against Nebo, “I took from there the vessels of YHWH and dragged them before  Chemosh,” the Moabite deity. The Tetragrammaton also appears twelve times in the Lachish ostraca, ca. 589 B.C. The extra-biblical evidence from the 9th to the 2nd century B.C.

This has been summarized by G. R. Driver: “There is absolute unanimity in our sources about the name given his God by Moses. The spelling YHWH…is always found in prose passages in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in the Mesha Stone (ninth century) and the Lachish Letters (circ 589 B. C). Beside this fuller form there was also a normally abbreviated form Yahu (…) which is found in all early personal names (shortened in northern Israel to –Yau and after the Exile to Yah .

G. R. Driver, “The original form of the name, ‘Yahweh: evidence and conclusions,” ZAW, XLVI (1928): 7-25. 5 8R. de Vaux, “The Revelation of the Divine Name YHWH” in Proclamation and Presence, ed. by John I. Durham and J. Roy Porter (London: S.C.M. Press, Ltd., 1970), pp. 48-75.

“The longer of the two reduced suffixing forms of the divine name, yāh and yāhu, indicates that the name probably had the phonetic shape /yahw-/ with a final vowel (…) In the Aramaic letters from Elephantine in Egypt (ca. 400 B.C.; ANET, 491–92), the divine name occurs in the spelling yhw, probably with the vocalization yah… Instances of the divine name written in Greek letters, such as Iao (equivalent to “Yaho”), Iabe (known to the Samaritans, Theodoret [4th century A.D.], and Epiphanius), Iaoue, Iaouai (Clement of Alexandria [3d century]), and Iae also favor the form “Yahweh” (NWDB, 453) (D. N. Freedman, The Anchor Bible Dictionary vol. 6 (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 1012).

Was the Name known previous to Moses?

But already, much prior to this incident, right from Genesis and the story of the encounter with Abraham, God is called by the so-called tetragrammaton “YHWH” in the Bible. How are these two related? In fact the verse itself names the subject as YHWH. Michael Heiser in episode 266 of his Naked Bible podcast cites Frank Anderson (27:00) who is a very well-known in both critical and Christian circles, and very widely published Hebrew scholar who gives an alternate translation of this verse in his book “the Sentence in Biblical Hebrew”. This book is an academic scholarly work and gets into difficult Hebrew syntax. But this is how he translates this verse: “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El-Shaddai. And my name is Yahweh. Did I not make myself known to them?” He laments the fact that there is very little interaction by critical scholars with Anderson’s view on this. He says that this is either just a huge oversight or it just gets in the way with the “JEDP” hypothesis and so it ignored. I think this is around pg.102 of that book but I need to re-read it.

Yahweh and Yeshua -Jesus

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a nice perspective on the relation of the two Divine Names of Christianity: “we must recognize that the Name of God is found more fully in Christ than in the tetragrammaton. The name “Jesus” is derived from the Hebrew “Yehoshua” (meaning: “YHWH saves”). It was shortened in the mid to late Old Covenant to “Yeshua” which is the Hebrew/Aramaic form of Our Lord’s Name. Thus, anytime the Name of Jesus is mentioned, the Divine Name is included by the nature of the Hebraic formula as “Yeh,” “Yah,” and “Yoh” all form linguistically equivalent expressions of the Name: “Iahveh.” This truth reminds us that the Name of Jesus is far more exalted and worthy of reverence than even the Divine Name in the New Covenant. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: CCC, 2666: But the one name that contains everything is the one that the Son of God received in his incarnation: JESUS. The divine name may not be spoken by human lips, but by assuming our humanity The Word of God hands it over to us and we can invoke it: “Jesus,” “YHWH saves.” The name “Jesus” contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray “Jesus” is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies. Jesus is the Risen One, and whoever invokes the name of Jesus is welcoming the Son of God who loved him and who gave himself up for him.” (CCC 57, 58)

Michael Heiser on’t

This is Michael Heiser’s whole article on the topic of the tetragrammaton. It’s really good, so have a look. I link the website from which it’s copied below, but also reproduce it here:
“

The God of Israel goes by a variety of names in the Hebrew Bible. Most are “el” derivatives (El-Shaddai; El-Olam; El-Roi, etc.). At other times Israel’s God is referred to with Hebrew ha-shem (“the Name”; e.g., Isa 30:27 [cp. vv. 29, 30). Questions about the “true” name of Israel’s God, however, have the special covenant name in view – the name revealed to Moses at the burning bush event preparatory to the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. Consequently, that’s my focus here. I’ll try to keep the discussion from becoming too technical. For those who want a more technical explanation, see the link in the footnote.¹

We read in Exod 3:12, 14, in response to Moses’ question to God about his name, that God responds אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh = usually rendered, “I am who/that I am” or “I will be who/what I will be”). However, over 6800 times the name of God is written YHWH (יהוה) — conventionally vocalized as yahweh, not אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה (‘ehyeh). This naturally gives rise to two questions: (1) Why the difference in spelling? and (2) How is the name pronounced? I’ll address both of these questions in tandem since they are related

The difference in spellings is a matter of Hebrew morphology – word formation. God is the speaker in Exod 3:14 and is speaking of himself. As a result, what God says in answer is in the first person.² God’s answer (‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh) employs the “to be” verb in biblical Hebrew two times. That verb is Hebrew hyh. The middle consonant (y) was frequently interchanged in ancient Semitic languages with the consonant “w” in “to be” formations. The Semitic root hwy (“to be, become”) and Aramaic hwh (“to be, become”) are also considered part of the explanation. I bring this up because it is necessary to account for the “w” in yhwh (as opposed to yhyh) in the divine name form.

So, to this point, what do we have?

1. God, speaking in the first person, gives his name as ‘ehyeh, the grammatical first person form of hyh/hwh.

2. The first person form thus has four consonants: ‘-h-y-h (the first consonant is one we don’t have in English; it is the letter aleph which is a stop in the back of the throat and not pronounced).

Moving on ….

The above name is based on a verbal root (hyh/hwh), and therefore has a parsing. In Hebrew grammar/morphology this would be: Qal stem, first person, singular, imperfect conjugation, from hyh/hwh.

The *expected* third person form of the same stem and conjugation would be yihyeh (or, yihweh). It’s translation would be “he is” or “he will be.”

So why do scholars say that the first vowel in the divine name is an “a” vowel – yahweh instead of yihyeh (or yihweh)?

The “a” vowel in the first syllable is quite secure. We know this because an abbreviated form of the divine name (“Yah” – always vocalized with “a”) appears in the Hebrew Bible nearly 50 times, mostly in Psalms (e.g., Exod 15:2; Exod 17:16 – note, this is the same book as the longer form; Isa 12:2; Isa 26:4 – along with the longer form; Psa 68:5; Psa 68:19). The most familiar form to readers is no doubt the phrase halelû-Yah (“praise Yah!”; e.g., Psa 146:10; Psa 147: 1).

The real controversial part of all this for scholars comes with the second syllable (scholars lead exciting lives). Here’s what must be accounted for:

1. The form itself must be the imperfect conjugation, since the “y” of the first syllable is prefixed to the verb root (hyh/hwh).

2. The first syllable must have an a-class vowel (“yah”) to account for the abbreviated form of the name noted above.

3. The second syllable must be an i-class vowel because of the verb root (lemma). The ancient Semitic root hwy also requires an i-class vowel in the second syllable.

There is only one morphological verb formation (parsing) that makes sense of these elements: Hiphil stem, third person, singular, imperfect conjugation, from hyh/hwh. This form is vocalized yahyeh / yahweh and would mean “he who causes to be” (the Hiphil is a causative stem in Hebrew). This is controversial because the verb hyh/hwh does not appear in the Hiphil causative stem elsewhere. Hence scholars are uneasy about taking the divine name this way. Personally, the logic here doesn’t feel compelling to me. I;m not sure why it’s necessary to have a verb form appear elsewhere for it to be considered coherent where it does / might occur. I understand the desire for another example, but it is not a logical necessity if it makes sense. And in the context of Israel’s God in effect creating a nation out of the slave population of Israel, it makes good theological / conceptual sense. But I’m in the minority here, probably because of the (in my view, overly cautious and logically unnecessary) desire for an external example of this lemma in this stem.

There are other, much more technical, reasons why a Hiphil cannot be deemed certain. For example, one concerns its meaning: “he causes to be.” Scholars expect some sort of direct object (what is caused to be) and so some suspect that yahweh is actually part of a fuller divine title. The obvious biblical example here is yahweh tseba’ot (translated, “Yahweh/Lord of hosts/armies”) which would mean “he who creates the (heavenly) hosts/armies”). I like this suggestion, as it would be a theological claim to the supremacy of Yahweh above all other divine entities as their creator, but this approach is still only speculative.

So, to sum up, the above is why most scholars feel fine with yahweh as a conventional vocalization of the Tetragrammaton, even though they aren’t sure or comfortable as to how to explain its etymology.

Related:

I at times also get the bizarre question about whether “Jesus” (Greek: Ιησους) is really the name “Zeus” (or somehow related). Short answer: no – just because some sounds in a word in a language are used in another word in that language doesn’t mean the meanings of both words overlap (!) – like I said, bizarre. For a longer answer, you can check out Dr. Mike Brown’s essay on the question.

1. Click here for a 17-page PDF file of the relevant pages discussing the divine name YHWH and Exo 3:14 from three sources: Jenni and Westermann, Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament; the entry on “Yahweh” from Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD); and the entry on “Yahweh (deity)” from the Anchor Bible Dictionary. Note that this file discuss the fact that Yehovah / Jehovah is a mis-vocalization of the divine name, a mistake created either in the Middle Ages or later in 1518 under Pope Leo X. I recommend all three of these resources to readers. ↩
2. God does, via the biblical writer, speak of himself in the third person as well. For example, note the change from first person to third person in Amos 4:11. ↩

I include the document Heiser is alluding to:

Other Divine Names

El, Elah, Elohim

Jesus’ cry from the Cross “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”(Matthew 27:46) These words are quoted from the first verse of the twenty-second Psalm. However, it is to be observed, that they are not the very words of the Hebrew original (  לָמָ֣ה עֲזַבְתָּ֑נִי אֵלִ֣י אֵלִ֣י- eli eli lamah azabtani Psalm 22:1)) but are in what is called Syro-Chaldaic, at that time the language of the country, and the dialect which our Lord seems always to have used. Mark expresses the two first words rather differently, namely; Eloi, Eloi (Mark 15), which comes nearer to the Syriac.”

Elah (Aramaic: אֱלָה; Syriac: ܐܠܗ; pl. “elim”) is the Aramaic word for God and the absolute singular form of ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ ʾalāhā. The origin of the word is from proto-semitic ʔil and is thus cognate to the Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, and other semitic languages’ words for god. Elah is found in the Tanakh in the books of Ezra, Jeremiah (Jer 10:11, the only verse in the entire book written in Aramaic), and Daniel. Elah is used to describe both pagan gods and the Abrahamic God. The word ‘Elah – إله’ is also an Arabic word meaning god. The word is etymologically related to Allah which is a contraction of الٱِلٰه ʾal- ʾilāh, literally meaning “the God” and is used for the Abrahamic God by Arabic-speaking Jews, Christians, Muslims, and sometimes other monotheistic religions. “elah” which seems seems to be the Aramaic or North-Western Semitic form for God, comes into Hebrew as “el”,  but into the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula as “ilah- Muslims added “al”, to get Allah. For eg in Surah Fatiha you have “alhamdu li-llahi”, which is “praise be-to-ilah (or lah)”, so also Mohammed’s father is said to be Abdullah (it is uncertain what the original pronunciation of the “u” vowel was meant to be, since vowels were not written in the ancient Arabic script.

•          Elah Yisrael, God of Israel (Ezra 5:1)

•          Elah Yerushelem, God of Jerusalem (Ezra 7:19)

•          Elah Shemaya, God of Heaven (Ezra 7:23)

•          Elah-avahati, God of my fathers, (Daniel 2:23)

•          Elah Elahin, God of gods (Daniel 2:47)

Relation of Yahweh to Arabic term for God?

As we stated already, we have shown that in the Judeo-Christian tradition we have the strong scriptural notion of God as Existence itself, a notion derived from Him stating his Name as a nominal form of the verb for existence. There is no verb for “to be” in Arabic however. There is also equivalent nominal usage of the verb “to be” in the Quran where Allah says “I am the one who is”. I don’t think it is possible to say such a thing in Arabic. Because the verb is not uses nominally in the Quran as it is in the Bible, it is hard to see how it can be maintained that “Being” is a scripturally derived name for God in Islam.

El Roi

In the Book of Genesis, Hagar uses this name for the God who spoke to her through his angel. In Hebrew, her phrase “El Roi”, literally, “God of Seeing Me”, is translated in the King James Version as “Thou God seest me.”

Elyon

The name Elyon (Hebrew: עליון) occurs in combination with El, YHWH, Elohim and alone. It appears chiefly in poetic and later Biblical passages. The modern Hebrew adjective “`Elyon” means “supreme” (as in “Supreme Court”) or “Most High”. El Elyon has been traditionally translated into English as ‘God Most High’. The Phoenicians used what appears to be a similar name for God, one that the Greeks wrote as Έλιονα. It is cognate to the Arabic `Aliyy.

“The Eternal One” is increasingly used, particularly in Reform and Reconstructionist communities seeking to use gender-neutral language. In the Torah, Hashem El Olam (“the Everlasting God”) is used at Genesis 21:33 to refer to God.

“HaShem”

It is common Jewish practice to restrict the use of the names of God to a liturgical context. In casual conversation some Jews, even when not speaking Hebrew, will call God Hashem (השם‎), which is Hebrew for “the Name” (cf. Leviticus 24:11 and Deuteronomy 28:58). Likewise, when quoting from the Tanakh or prayers, some pious Jews will replace Adonai with HaShem. For example, when making audio recordings of prayer services, HaShem will generally be substituted for Adonai.

Jesus in Aramaic

Jews wrote Aramaic with the Hebrew script, but pronounced it differently than the biblical Hebrew language. Our transliteration of Hebrew is based on the rabbinical pronunciation of the biblical texts. The original Hebrew texts had no vowels; the system of vowels and pronunciations we have of ancient Hebrew today was passed down (and in some cases made up, or at least formalized) by rabbis. So a rabbi reading ישוע in a biblical text would pronounce it completely differently than a first-century Jew on the street speaking Aramaic, reading the same characters. Syriac Christians (see below), whose liturgical language is essentially Aramaic as it would have been spoken in the first century, pronounce these same characters, ישוע, not as “Yeshua” but as “Isho.”

Aramaic and Classical Syriac render the pronunciation of the same letters as ܝܫܘܥ yeshuuʕ (yešuʕ) /yeʃuʕ/ and ܝܫܘܥ ishoʕ (išoʕ) /iʃoʕ/. The Aramaic Bibles and the Peshitta Syriac preserve these same spellings. Current scholarly consensus posits that the NT texts were translated from the Greek, but this theory is not supported directly at least by the name for Jesus, which is not a simple transliteration of the Greek form as would otherwise be expected, as Greek did not have an “sh” [ʃ] sound, and substituted; and likewise lacked and therefore omitted the final ‘ayin sound [ʕ]. Moreover, Eusebius (early fourth century) reports that Papius (early second century) reports that Jesus’s disciple Matthew wrote a gospel “in the Hebrew language”. (Note: Scholars typically argue the word “Hebrew” in the New Testament refers to Aramaic; however, others have attempted to refute this view.) The Aramaic of the Peshitta does not distinguish between Joshua and Jesus, and the Lexicon of William Jennings gives the same form ܝܫܘܥ for both names. The Hebrew final letter ayin ע‎ is equivalent to final ܥ in Classical Syriac and East Syriac and West Syriac. It can be argued that the Aramaic speakers who used this name had a continual connection to the Aramaic-speakers in communities founded by the apostles and other students of Jesus, thus independently preserved his historical name Yeshuuʕ and the Eastern dialectical Ishoʕ. Those churches following the East Syriac Rite still preserve the name Ishoʕ.

Appendix

Responding to Mythvision video

The name of God is referred to by the tetragrammaton YHWH in the hebrew manuscripts and we fill in the vowels, of which the initial “A” is more or less certain, since Ya/Yah occurs in “theophoric” names like those of the OT prophets.

When God does make a “my name is…” statement, it is really in the form of description rather than merely the tetragrammaton “I AM WHO AM” or simply “I AM”, or in the hHebrew “ehyeh asher ehyeh”, of which YHWH is a somewhat strained acronym. So if you ask me “What is the name of God”, I am more certain in answering “I AM WHO AM”.

From a Christian perspective, I would argue that the points presented in the video (and book) cannot account for the possibility of the correlation/causation fallacy. That is to say, assuming that God does go by that name which was indeed at some point authentically revealed to the ancients, it was not then misused to represent local deities or even to invent those deites and the legends surrounding them, including their consorts and so on.

With regards to referrng to body part of the Deity (face/feet/back/loins) this can be seen both as metaphoric language which facilitates the message. The message beng not that God has body parts, but rather what those parts can represent to us, for example the feet of God upon the earth symbolizes power and ownership.

Even if one goes so far as to say that the power of God is being represented in sexualized terms (which is certainly not explicit in the Bible, but is inferred in the video), in and of itself that is not troublesome. Sexual virility certainly is a sign of health and vitality and so is an appropriate metaphor, as long as it is not misused for sexual exploitation, of course.

Finally, it is an interesting observation that theh ancient gods did not tolerate their food being eaten, however, there is no indication from the Bible that the trees were anything to do with a divine diet.