Yahweh is the Hebrew name of the biblical God of the ancient Kingdom of Israel.
His name is composed of four Hebrew consonants (YHWH, known as tetragrammaton) that the prophet Moses would have revealed to his people.
Tetragrammaton of Yahweh.
See also the meaning of Adonai.
The origin and history of the name Yahweh
After the exile in Babylon (6th century a. a.), and especially from century III a. C., the Jews stopped using the name Yahweh.
When Judaism became a universal religion and not merely local the term Elohim, which means God, began to replace Yahweh in order to demonstrate the universal sovereignty of the God of Israel over all others.
At the same time, the divine name was increasingly considered too sacred to pronounce. For this reason, it was thus vocally replaced in the synagogue ritual by the Hebrew word Adonai (My Lord), which was translated as Kyrios ("Sir") in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The Masorites, Jewish scribes, who around the 6th to the 10th century worked to reproduce the original text from the Hebrew Bible, replaced the vowels of the name YHWH with the vowel signs of the Hebrew words Adonai or Elohim.
Latin-speaking Christian scholars have replaced the Y (which does not exist in Latin) with an I or a J. So, the tetragrammaton became the latin name Jehovah (JeHoWaH).
see also the meaning of Yahweh and Jehovah.
The name of the biblical God
In the book of Exodus, in chapters 3:13-15, Moses asks God what His name is. I am" and tells him to introduce him to the Israelites as YHWH (which looks like the expression "I Am" in Hebrew).
After the book of Exodus, in the biblical book of 1 Samuel, God is known by the name of Yahweh Teva-ot, or "He brings the hosts into being," the hosts possibly refer to the heavenly court or Israel.
God's personal name was probably known long before the time of Moses. Moses' mother's name, for example, was Jochebed (Yokheved), a word based on the name of Yahweh.
Thus, the tribe of Levi, to which Moses belonged, probably knew the name Yahweh, which originally could have been abbreviated as Yo, Yah or Yahu.
See also the meaning of:
- jah;
- Yeshua Hamashia;
- kadosh;
- El Shaday