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radioExodus 3:15
Nik Hookey considers the meaning of God's name YHWH and what it reveals of His nature.
'God also said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites, 'The Lord, the God of your fathers - the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob - has sent me to you.'"' (Exodus 3:15)
A strange question, you might think, but there is something very special going on in this verse in Exodus.
Strange as it may seem, up until this point in the Bible the Hebrews - the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, did not know the name of God. It is only here in Exodus (according to the big story of the Bible) that God's name at last is revealed.
In Hebrew it's simply four consonants - YHWH. Scholars sometimes call this the tetragrammaton (though that just means four letters.) or Divine Name.
You might sometimes have seen this put into English as Yahweh - adding in some vowels to make it pronounceable. We're not entirely sure that that is how it was pronounced, but it is our best guess.
What we do know is that the Jews never read the name out loud.
Originally, the Hebrew Bible was only made up of consonants. Then, around about the tenth century after Jesus, they had a Bible that had tiny little vowel signs written above the letters, to help people pronounce the word.
When it came to the Divine Name, the vowels attached to the consonants produce an impossible word in Hebrew. That is, until you remember that the Jews never read out loud God's name.
What did they say instead? They said "My Lord", or rather the Hebrew version of that, which is Adonay. This is a bit like in our English Bibles - wherever you see LORD in capitals, it is standing in for the Divine Name. (You do see 'LORD' in Genesis, but it's only because they're telling the story with hindsight, a bit like us talking about Queen Victoria as a girl, but her name then was Alexandrina.)
So in this tenth century Bible (called the Massoretic Text), the vowels attached to the Divine Name are actually the vowels of Adonay.
Big deal.
Well, it is kind of. Because you may have heard the name Jehovah for God. This name comes to us via German. 'Y' in German would be 'J', 'W' would be 'V'. This gives the consonants JHVH. Then if you add in the vowels of 'Adonay', you get 'JaHoVaH'. The 'a' is changed to an 'e', because it's a quite short sound in Hebrew, and you end up with 'Jehovah'.
So 'Jehovah' wasn't God's name, but probably for the last hundred
years or so, it has entered the English language anyway as a kind of
mish-mash of YHWH and the Hebrew for 'my Lord'.
Beware of
anyone who tells you that they know the name of God! All we can say
for sure is that we know the consonants are YHWH, and it was probably
pronounced Yah-weh. (Remembering to pronounce the first 'H'!)
But what is the significance?
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Abraham and his descendants did know the name of God, but as God's name Jehovah (YHWH) means "he causes to become," they had not at that stage, as a nation of slaves, seen him as "he who causes to become" that was soon to change.
Jehovah did become what he needed to become to affect their deliverance.
The fact that the Israelites already knew God's name is born of the fact that Moses's mother's name, Jochebed, means Jehovah is glory.