Tetragrammaton

The Tetragrammaton is the four-letter Hebrew-language theonym יהוה‎ (transliterated as YHWH), 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 (with niqqud: יַהוֶה) 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 (with a possible instance of יה‎ (Jah) in verse 8:6) the Song of Songs contain this Hebrew name. Observant Jews and those who follow Talmudic Jewish traditions do not pronounce יהוה‎ 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 אֲדֹנָי‎ (Adonai, lit. transl. 'My Lords', pluralis majestatis taken as singular) or אֱלֹהִים‎ (Elohim, literally 'gods' but treated as singular when meaning "God") in prayer, or הַשֵּׁם‎ (HaShem, 'The Name') in everyday speech.

The letters, properly written and read from right to left (in Biblical Hebrew), are:

The Hebrew Bible explains it by the formula אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה‎ ('ehye 'ăšer 'ehye pronounced [ʔehˈje ʔaˈʃer ʔehˈje] transl. I Am that I Am), the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14. This would frame Y-H-W-H as a derivation from the Hebrew triconsonantal root היה‎ (h-y-h), "to be, become, come to pass", with a third person masculine י‎ (y-) prefix, equivalent to English "he", in place of the first person א‎ ('-), thereby affording translations as "he who causes to exist", "he who is", etc.; although this would elicit the form Y-H-Y-H (יהיה‎), not Y-H-W-H. To rectify this, some scholars propose that the Tetragrammaton derived instead from the triconsonantal root הוה‎ (h-w-h)—itself an archaic doublet of היה‎—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.

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 (similar to the Latin use of I and V to indicate either the consonants /j, w/ or the vowels /i, u/). Hebrew letters used to indicate vowels are known as אִמּוֹת קְרִיאָה‎ (imot kri'a) or matres lectionis ("mothers of reading"). 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.