1: Which is the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton, Jehovah or Yahweh?
2: How should the tetragrammaton be rendered in the text of our english bible translations? Jehovah? Yahweh? LORD? YHWH?
Personally, I prefer YHWH, no pronunciation intended.
YAHWEH (DEITY) [Heb K yhwh (יהוה
]. The name of God in the OT. When it stands alone, and with prefixed prepositions or the conjunction wa-, “and,” the name is always written with the four Hebrew letters yod, he, waw, he, and is for that reason called the Tetragrammaton. In this form the name appears more than 6000 times in the OT. (Variation in the Masoretic mss makes it difficult to establish the number of occurrences exactly.) Shorter forms of the divine name occur in personal names. At the beginning of names the form is yĕhô- or the contracted form yô-; at the end of names, -yāhû or -yāh.
A. Pronunciation
The pronunciation of yhwh as Yahweh is a scholarly guess. Hebrew biblical mss were principally consonantal in spelling until well into the current era. The pronunciation of words was transmitted in a separate oral tradition. See MASORETIC TEXT. The Tetragrammaton was not pronounced at all, the word ʾădonāy, “my Lord,” being pronounced in its place; ʾelōhı̂m, “God,” was substituted in cases of the combination ʾădonāy yhwh (305 times; e.g., Gen 15:2). (This sort of reading in MT is called a qere perpetuum.) Though the consonants remained, the original pronunciation was eventually lost. When the Jewish scholars (called Masoretes) added vowel signs to biblical mss some time before the 10th century A.D., the Tetragrammaton was punctuated with the vowels of the word “Adonai” or “Elohim” to indicate that the reader should read “Lord” or “God” instead of accidentally pronouncing the sacred name (TDOT 5: 501–02).
The form “Jehovah” results from reading the consonants of the Tetragrammaton with the vowels of the surrogate word Adonai. The dissemination of this form is usually traced to Petrus Galatinus, confessor to Pope Leo X, who in 1518 A.D. transliterated the four Hebrew letters with the Latin letters jhvh together with the vowels of Adonai, producing the artificial form “Jehovah.” (This confused usage may, however, have begun as early as 1100 A.D.; note KB, 369). While the hybrid form Jehovah has met much resistance, and is universally regarded as an ungrammatical aberration, it nonetheless passed from Latin into English and other European languages and has been hallowed by usage in hymns and the ASV; it is used only a few times in KJV and not at all in RSV.
The generally acknowledged vocalization “Yahweh” is a reconstruction that draws on several lines of evidence. The longer of the two reduced suffixing forms of the divine name, yāh and yāhû, indicates that the name probably had the phonetic shape /yahw-/ with a final vowel. The vowel is supplied on the basis of the observation that the name derives from a verbal root hwy, which would require the final vowel /ē/; this inference is confirmed by the element yahwı̄ occurring in names in the Amorite language (see TDOT 5: 512; the relevance of the Amorite names is challenged by Knauf 1984: 467). 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 /yahû/ (TDOT 5: 505). 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).
Thompson, H. O. (1992). Yahweh (Deity). In D. N. Freedman (Ed.), The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (Vol. 6, p. 1011). New York: Doubleday.
