What Is the Name of God? YHWH, Yahweh, and Jehovah

Most of us, when we talk to God or about God, just say "God." But "God" is a title, like "King" or "Doctor" — not a name. The Hebrew Bible gives God a name: a personal one, revealed to a shepherd at a burning bush, and treated by his people as almost too holy to say out loud.

God's personal name is written with four Hebrew letters — YHWH — and it appears more than 6,800 times in the Old Testament. Scholars usually reconstruct the pronunciation as "Yahweh." Most English Bibles render it "the LORD," in small capitals. And "Jehovah" is a later, hybrid form of the very same name. If that last part surprises you, keep reading.

The four letters

The name is often called the Tetragrammaton — Greek for "four letters." In Hebrew it's yod, he, waw, he, written right to left, which comes into English as YHWH. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, and that's where much of the mystery begins: we have the consonants, but not, with certainty, the sounds between them.

It's the most common name for God in the Hebrew Bible, and yet it never appears in Ecclesiastes, Esther, or the Song of Songs. It enters the story at a specific moment — a man named Moses, an ordinary bush on fire, and a question.

"I AM": what the name means

Moses asks God who he should say has sent him. God answers:

"God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.' And he said, 'Say this to the people of Israel: "I AM has sent me to you."'" — Exodus 3:14 (ESV)

The Hebrew phrase is ehyeh asher ehyeh, built from the verb "to be." Hebrew's tense here is famously hard to pin down — it can be read as "I AM WHO I AM" or "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE." Both are legitimate, and they pull in slightly different directions. One points to God's self-existence: he simply is, uncaused, without beginning or end, depending on nothing. The other points to his presence: "I will be with you," the God who shows up. The name seems to hold both at once.

Christian thinkers pressed the first reading furthest, and early — from Origen in the third century to Augustine and Aquinas later — hearing in the name a claim that God is not one being among many but Being itself, the source everything else depends on and that depends on nothing. Ambrose put it in three words: "the true Name of God — Eternity." Many Hebrew scholars lean the other way, toward the plainer sense in the story: a God promising, at that moment, to be present with Moses. It's a rich enough name to carry both.

A verse later, God ties this back to the four letters:

"…'The LORD, the God of your fathers… has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations." — Exodus 3:15 (ESV)

Where your English Bible prints "the LORD" there, the Hebrew underneath is YHWH.

Why "Yahweh" — and why we can't be sure

If the name is written without vowels, how do we know it's "Yahweh"?

Honestly, we don't — not with certainty. Over time, Jewish reverence for the name grew so deep that people stopped saying it aloud at all. Rather than risk misusing it — the command not to take God's name in vain (Exodus 20:7) sat heavily — they would read the word Adonai, "Lord," wherever the text said YHWH, or simply call it HaShem, "the Name." Across generations, the living memory of the pronunciation faded.

"Yahweh" is scholars' best reconstruction, and it's a good one. The clues include the short form "Yah" that survives in words like hallelujah (literally "praise Yah"), early Greek writers who spelled the name out phonetically, and Hebrew names that carry the divine name inside them — Elijah, for instance, means "my God is Yah." Put the evidence together and "Yahweh" is the most likely sound. But an honest reader admits the gap where the memory was lost.

Why your Bible says "the LORD"

Between roughly the 6th and 10th centuries, Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes carefully preserved the Hebrew text and, for the first time, added vowel markings beneath the consonants. When they reached YHWH, they did something deliberate: they kept the four consonants but wrote the vowels of Adonai underneath — a built-in cue to say "Adonai" aloud rather than attempt the name itself.

That is why most English translations still print "the LORD" in small capital letters. It's the translators' signal that the Hebrew there is the divine name, read as "Lord" the way Jewish tradition does. Most readers walk straight past it.

Where "Jehovah" comes from

Later readers — mostly Christians reading Hebrew — saw those four consonants with Adonai's vowels attached and did the natural thing: they read them as a single word. YHWH plus those vowels, run together and passed through Latin and German pronunciation, produced "Jehovah."

The form appears in Latin as early as around 1270, in a manuscript by the friar Raymond Martini, and became widespread after a scholar named Petrus Galatinus used it in 1518. (You'll sometimes hear that Galatinus invented it. He didn't — he popularized it.) A couple of ordinary sound-shifts did the rest: Latin had no "Y" consonant, so it hardened into "J," and the Hebrew "W" softened into "V."

So "Jehovah" is not a fake, and there's nothing wrong with the reverence people feel for it — it has been sung in churches for centuries. It just isn't the original name: it's a hybrid, born from reading two layers of the text as one word.

The name and Jesus

There's a final chapter to the name's story, where its history runs into the central claim of Christianity — worth following whether or not you share that faith.

When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the divine name was, in most manuscripts, rendered Kyrios, "Lord." (Some of the oldest copies kept YHWH in Hebrew letters inside the Greek text; the substitution became standard later.) Kyrios is the word the New Testament writers then reach for — and they do something striking with it: they take passages about YHWH and apply them to Jesus. Paul borrows a line from Isaiah, where every knee bows to God alone, and writes:

"…at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." — Philippians 2:10–11 (ESV)

And Jesus himself, in John's Gospel, says something that made his hearers reach for stones:

"Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." — John 8:58 (ESV)

"I am" — in Greek, ego eimi. It's worth being careful here, because the link is often overstated: the phrase does not come from the Greek of Exodus 3:14, which reads ho ōn, "the one who is." It matches, instead, the passages in Isaiah where God says again and again, "I am he" — ego eimi in Greek. That seems to be the well Jesus is drawing from. And his audience did not miss it: to them it sounded like a man setting himself where only God's name had stood, and they reached for stones (John 8:59). Make of the claim what you will — but there's little doubt what they heard.

Many titles, one name

The single name YHWH often gets paired with another word — a compound name for how God shows up in a particular moment:

• Yahweh-Jireh — "the LORD will provide" (Genesis 22:14)
• Yahweh-Rapha — "the LORD your healer" (Exodus 15:26)
• Yahweh-Nissi — "the LORD is my banner" (Exodus 17:15)
• Yahweh-Shalom — "the LORD is peace" (Judges 6:24)

Older still is El Shaddai, usually translated "God Almighty" (Genesis 17:1) — though scholars genuinely debate the Hebrew here, with "Mountain God" a leading alternative to "Almighty."

And here's what's worth noticing, because it loops straight back to Jesus: those same titles resurface in the way he speaks about himself. Where the Old Testament calls God the one who provides, Jesus says, "I am the bread of life" (John 6:35). Where God is Israel's healer, Jesus spends his ministry healing the sick. The Scriptures call God their light; Jesus says, "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12). And where God is named peace, Jesus tells his followers, "my peace I give to you" (John 14:27) — a claim Paul later makes without hedging: "he himself is our peace" (Ephesians 2:14).

It reads like a deliberate echo: the compound titles of YHWH picked up, one by one, by a first-century teacher describing himself. Make of that what you will — it's the same quiet move we saw earlier, the divine name reappearing on Jesus's lips.

Each of these could fill its own post. But provider, healer, light, peace — they're all facets of the one name given at the bush: the God who is, and who is with his people.

Keep exploring

The name of God turns out to be a small door into a very large room — Hebrew grammar, Jewish reverence, the history of translation, and the claim at the heart of Christianity.

Want to follow any thread here? You can explore it with TheoGPT — ask what ehyeh asher ehyeh means, compare how translations handle the divine name, or trace "the LORD" through a passage you're reading.

Sources

• Scripture: Exodus 3:13–15; 6:2–3; 20:7; Genesis 17:1; 22:14; Exodus 15:26; 17:15; Judges 6:24; John 8:58; Philippians 2:9–11 (all ESV).
• Jewish Encyclopedia, "Tetragrammaton."
• Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent), "Jehovah (Yahweh)."
• Larry W. Hurtado (University of Edinburgh), on YHWH in the Septuagint and the divine name applied to Jesus.
• Crossway, "What Does Exodus 3:14 Mean?"
• Blue Letter Bible and Bible.org, on the compound names of God.