Pronunciation of the Divine Name

The Bible as Witness

Ask someone attending a protestant or Catholic church, “What’s the name of the God to whom you pray?” Confirm whether the following is accurate: most will respond with “God” or “Lord” or perhaps “He has no name”. Hmm. So what is the correct answer? It can be said that “God” is a category and “Lord” is a title. Indeed, in German Bibles “Lord” is replaced with “Herr”, which in English we would translate as “Mr.” So what’s the history of using “Lord” as the name of the God of Abraham?

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read the preface of your Bible and see if it doesn’t speak about its translation of the Divine Name. If your Bible preface doesn’t speak about it, I have copied an excerpt from the preface of my New American Standard Bible (NASB) translation for you to look at. Knowing what’s in the preface will help you to appreciate what I’m covering in the rest of this post. I think it is not a minor problem for Christians today.

Next time you read some Old Testament Scripture, notice how often you come across “the LORD”. It’s everywhere — try to find a Psalm without it! What the NASB translators fail to highlight is that their replacement of the Divine Name, YHWH, with “the LORD” occurs well over 6,000 times in the Bible. You read that right: over six thousand times! Now imagine all those instances being replaced by the original Divine Name, as it was written in the stone tablets at Mt. Sinai, as it was written in the Hebrew scrolls, as it was written even in the Greek Septuagint. If this relatively recent Great Replacement — effectively a censorship of the Divine Name — hadn’t occurred over the past century, I suspect that many more Christians today would know the name of the God to whom they pray. Rather than using categories or titles, don’t you think the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would want to communicate with you on a first-name basis, just as he did with them?

¹Hyperlinks are to Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary entries at BibleHub.com

The great Divine Name, also called the Tetragrammaton (or Tetragram), is written יהוה (right to left; the Hebrew letters yod-he-waw-he), and is transliterated into Latin as YHWH (left to right). The biblical child names and their translations listed above are called theophoric names because they incorporate at the beginning of each name יהו, the first three letters of the Tetragram. We can plainly see how the first three letters of the Divine Name are pronounced from the consensus pronunciation of these names: Yeho. We can also see the uniformity of the Greek letters Ἰω (iota-omega) as the transcription of yod-he-waw in the Septuagint, which is a translation of an ancient, no longer existing Hebrew source. I’ll describe below how this Greek transcription is fully consistent with the ostensibly newer Masoretic Hebrew text. But first let’s examine the Masoretic Hebrew version of these names.

Unlike Greek, the Hebrew alphabet contains only consonants. Without vowels being indicated, a reader cannot know how to pronounce a sequence of consonants. So two systems were developed to specify vowel usage. The first and oldest system is called matres lectionis. It is very accurate, but is the less precise of the two systems. An understanding of the matres lectionis system is fundamental for Hebraists, but is not necessary for this post. A second system called vowel pointing was developed during the first millennium CE to assist in the study of classical Hebrew in the Bible. In this more precise system, small marks called niqqud were created to specify which sounds are to be used to vocalize consonants. We will use this system to understand the pronunciation of YHWH. Here is the vowel-pointing of the prefix YHW in the theophoric names listed above in the Masoretic Hebrew:

יְהוֹ

We see that the letters yod and he are bridged by a shewa, two small vertical points inserted beneath the yod (יְ). The letters he and waw are bridged with a holam, a dot placed above the waw (וֹ). The shewa indicates a very slight English letter E sound, as in the English words average and select. (Note that the word average and the theoretical word avrage, although spelled differently, would be homophonic — pronounced the same — because the middle letter E is barely audible in average.) The holam indicates a long letter O sound, as in the English word no. Thus, in this way, the Masoretic vowel-pointing of yod-he-waw produces the pronunciation Yeho for the beginning of every biblical Hebrew theophoric name listed above. What about the Greek?

The Greek alphabet has characters allotted for the same vowels found in English. Plus it has additional characters to indicate abnormally long E and O sounds, e-ta and o-mega (literally “big O”), respectively. We will only concern ourselves here with the Greek vowels iota (Ι,ι) and omega (Ω,ω) because, as seen above in the theophoric name list, these two vowels alone constitute the Greek transcription of the Hebrew YHW:

Ἰω

At first glance, this transcription is a bit suspicious because only two Greek characters are used to replicate the sound made by three Hebrew characters. How can that be? Well, let’s start from the beginning. First, note that the iota has an apostrophe to its left. This is called a psilí mark and indicates normal pronunciation, so it is of no practical importance here. (For more information on Greek diacritical marks, Wikipedia is a good place to start.) Following iota there is the omega. Clearly the Septuagint translators chose iota to reproduce the sound made by the Hebrew yod, and then omega to reproduce the Hebrew waw. And that’s it: iota-omega. So did the translators neglect to include the middle letter he in their transcription? No.

The Hebrew he is accounted for in the transcription because the shewa, and consequently the vocalized he, were nearly inaudible. That’s the reason. But even if shewa-he were clearly audible, a Greek transcription of shewa-he would be accurate, because the Greek alphabet has no equivalent letter to the Hebrew consonant he. Thus, due to the subtlety of shewa-he when spoken, the pronunciation of “Yeho” physically sounded to a listener as “Yo”. Practice this pronunciation of Yeho yourself. The inaudible shewa also explains the spelling of these theophoric names in some Hebrew dictionaries as “Yho” rather than “Yeho” — the shewa is simply omitted because its role in pronunciation is of no consequence. Likewise, the Septuagint translators had no issue repeatedly using iota-omega as the Greek transcription for the Hebrew pronunciation of YHW.

Additional evidence that shewa-he was barely audible when YHW was spoken is found in the Hebrew Bible. As in the Greek, many Hebrew theophoric names also omit the shewa-he from יְהוֹ (Yeho), leaving only יוֹ (Yo) as the prefix. Like a muscle, it is as if the letters shewa-he atrophied because, in practice, they weren’t being used — their vocalization was so faint. In the follow pair groups each name is spelled differently, but the pairs are essentially homophones; that is, they are pronounced the same:

So YHWH has preserved the pronunciation of His Name through the names of the children of Israel. These names survived the death of the Hebrew language and over the centuries have transcended language barriers! Theophoric names such as Yehochanan, Yehochanah, Yehonathan, Yehoseph and Yehoshua are still widely used today in a variety of languages. Sadly, ignorance, localization (Hellenization, Anglicization, etc.) and abbreviation of these names masks their Hebrew roots. For example, in the Anglosphere, many of the Johns, Joannas, Jos, Jonathans, Jons, Josephs, Joes, Joshuas and Joshes may know that they have biblical names, but they have no idea that their names incorporate the same yod-he-waw that begins their Creator’s name.

No onomastic support from the Bible for Yahweh and Yahuwah pronunciations of the Divine Name

As I have described above, the respective vowel-pointing and transcription of Hebrew theophoric names in the Hebrew Bible and Greek Septuagint are witness to a Yeho pronunciation for the first three letters of the Tetragram. However, during the past century, Yahweh has been increasingly promoted and gained wide traction as the proper Hebrew pronunciation of YHWH. And more recently, in the internet age, other Yah-based pronunciations such as Yahuwah have gained popularity. Yet onomastics — the study of proper names — applied to the Hebrew and Greek Bible support none of these vocalizations. None of the theophoric names prefixed with YHW are vowel-pointed in the Hebrew Bible as Yah or Yahu. Not even one biblical witness! And none of these Hebrew names are transcribed Ἰα (iota-alpha) or Ἰαυ (iota-alpha-upsilon) in the Greek Septuagint. Again, not even one example. Instead, the biblical witnesses are congruent with a Yeho pronunciation. It defies all logic to argue that the letters yod-he-waw in these dozens of Hebrew theophoric names are pronounced differently than in the context of the great Divine Name from which they originated.

Further, among the Hebrew theophoric names beginning with the abbreviated yod-waw (יו) prefix, all of them are vowel-pointed Yo (יוֹ), which is consistent with the removal of the inaudible shewa-he from Yeho. This means none of them are vowel-pointed in a way consistent with a Yah or Yahu pronunciation of YHW: יו is never vowel-pointed Ya (expected for Yahweh) or Yu (expected for Yahuwah). Consequently, Anglicized names such as Jahn, Janathan, Jaseph and Juhn, Junathan, Juseph never emerged from these Hebrew theophoric names. Instead, only Yeho-based names such as John, Jonathan and Joseph appeared.

Completing the pronunciation — biblical names ending in WH

With the pronunciation of YHW now sorted, we can move on to the final syllable of the Tetragram. How to pronounce WH? This is quite simple. In all biblical proper names that end in waw-he (וה), the vowel-pointing in the Hebrew Bible is waw-qamats-he (וָה). A qamats indicates an English letter A vowel sound as in the word all. Thus, waw-qamats-he gives the pronunciation wah:

So putting it all together, YHWH with vowel-pointing is spelled yod-shewa-he-holam-waw-qamats-he. In Hebrew square script this would take the form יְהוָֹה and in Classical Hebrew would be pronounced Yehowah. In modern Hebrew, the name is pronounced Yehovah (YHVH). And naturally there are differences among localizations: in the Anglosphere, the Divine Name is rendered Jehovah (with an “English J“). In Germany, it is Jehova (with a “normal” letter J). And so on. But Yehowah is the answer to the question: How did Yeshua likely pronounce the Hebrew name YHWH when standing and reading Isaiah 61 from the scroll in the synagogue on the Sabbath as described in Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Luke?

Credits

The information and knowledge used to put together this post came from the rigorous study of the Tetragram and its history by the polymath Gérard Gertoux. His original study has been published in French and is entitled Un Historique Du Nom Divin — Un Nom Encens. I recommend this book, even for those not fluent in French, because the formatting is professional and diacritics important for the understanding of Hebrew pronunciations are intact. However, he has generously provided on his academic website free downloadable versions of an English translation of the above book (PDF) as well as a simplified edition (PDF). These latter works are self-published and suffer somewhat from proofreading-level mistakes and especially typographical errors in special glyphs important to communicate pronunciation of certain words, rendering these words illegible. However, by complementing the free English versions with a purchased French copy, I was able to resolve the legibility problem. Anyone interested in the Divine Name and its history, from Adam to Egypt to Jesus to modern times, should by all means read what Gertoux has uncovered.

In the next few posts, I will continue on this topic and discuss the origin and meaning of the names Yah and Yahu, which are found appended to the end of many Hebrew theophoric names, for example, Ysha’yah (Isaiah) and Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah). However, Hebrews never used them at the beginning of theophoric names as this was a position reserved for Yeho and Yo of the venerated great Divine Name.