Where did the name Jehovah come from?

Most English translations render the name of Godnin the Old Testament as “LORD” while others write “Yahweh” or Jehovah”. What is this name? What did it come from? Why don’t some bibles use it? What’s the history?

What is the name of God used in ancient Hebrew texts? Well, that’s hard to know for certain because ancient Hebrew was written without vowels. Therefore ancient Hebrew texts didn’t spell out the entire name of God, but only the consonants. The name of God was therefore written יהוה which corresponds to the English letters YHVH. This is called the Tetragrammaton and is the personal name referring to God in the Old Testament.

The origin and meaning

If you look in Exodus 3, Moses asks God what his name is and God answers in verse 14:

Exodus 3:14 – And God said to Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, You shall say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.

The Hebrew word God used was spelled “AHYH” and literally means “I am”. A is the Hebrew grammatical particle for the first person pronoun “I”. HYH and the synonym HVH means “to exist” So AHYH and AHVH means “I exist”. This points to a unique quality only God has, that he is the only one who exists without depending on anything else for his existence. Everything else is ultimately dependent upon God for it’s existence. But God is the self-existent one.

Of course, people can’t call God “I am” when they’re speaking about him. “He is” would be the more appropriate way for another person to refer to him. And the Hebrew grammatical particle for the third person pronoun “He” is “Y”. So in verse 15 God goes on to say:

Exodus 3:15 – God said moreover to Moses, “You shall tell the children of Israel this, ‘Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and this is my memorial to all generations.

So God tells them to use the name “YHVH”, or as some translations render it “Yahweh” or “Jehovah”. We’ll get into that later on. And YHVH means “He is” or “He exists”.

The pronounciation got lost

At some point during the second temple period the Jews became so afraid of misusing God’s name that they stopped using it altogether. So when reading aloud they would often substitute for another name or title of God such as “Adonai” which means lord. Later on Hebrew started using vowel points to indicate to unfamiliar readers how the words were to be pronounced. So words like Adonai got the vowel points for “A-O-A”.

Adonai with vowel points in red.

But since they didn’t want people to speak the name of God they also took these vowel points and put them on the YHVH as a reminder to the reader that when they get to this word they should say “Adonai” instead.

YHVH with vowel points for Adonai in red

Jump forward a few hundred years and Christianity has started. Lots of gentile believers come in. Early gentile translators wants to transliterate the holy name into other languages and they find the YHVH in the Hebrew text. But it has the vowel points for Adonai. Since they weren’t aware of this Jewish practice, they of course thought the vowels belonged there, (YaHoVaH) and the resulting form was transliterated around the 12th century as Yehowah. The derived forms Iehouah and Jehovah first appeared in the 16th century.

Jehovah was first introduced by William Tyndale in his translation of Exodus 6:3, and appears in some other early English translations including the Geneva Bible and the King James Version.

The Septuagint and the intertestamental period

Going back a little to the intertestamental period, the period between the Old and New Testament, and the Greeks were dominating the Middle East. The Hebrew Torah was translated into Greek at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285 – 247 BCE) by 70 Jewish scholars. He is said to have divided them up into teams to translate the Torah to make sure they didn’t try to hide anything. When he compared the results he found that they were identical, which impressed him a lot. So the Septuagint became known as a very trustworthy Greek translation of the Old Testament.

Except from a few rare copies the Septuagint consistently translated the Tetragrammaton with the Greek title Kyrios, which means Lord. That’s why many modern translations keep translating the name as “LORD”.

This is interesting to know because 80% of the scripture quotations that Jesus and the Apostles quoted in the New Testament come from the Septuagint translation. And neither Jesus nor any other writer of the New Testament ever used the Tetragrammaton or any transliteration of the divine name. It simply fell out of use both verbally and in written form.

What about the actual pronunciation?

The best guess scholars can come up with for the Tetragrammaton is “Yahweh”.

But it is worth noting that if the almighty God wanted his name to be preserved and actually thought the exact pronunciation was important, then wouldn’t he be able to do so?

Instead he let history take a course where the exact pronunciation is unknown. And when even his son, Jesus Christ, never used the divine name even once, you have to assume it is not very important to the New Testament story.

The reason for this is Jesus.

Jesus, the name above every other name

The name Jesus is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Yeshua. Yeshua or Yehoshua means “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh is the savior”. And that was Jesus role. Jesus is God come in the flesh. He is Yahweh of the Old Testament come as the savior. “Yahweh is the savior”, or “Jesus.”

So we can understand why the name Yahweh is not mentioned directly in the New Testament. While it is not written directly it is actually mentioned indirectly every time Jesus name is mentioned.

And Philippians 2:9–11 explains:

Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name; 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

So Jesus is now the name we should focus on. It is the name above every other name, including the name Yahweh. He is the one townhome our knees should bend in worship. Jesus is Lord. (And a Greek speaking Jew would see the phrase “Jesus is Lord” and immediately think “Jesus is Yahweh”.)

So that’s the short history of the name Jehovah. And like everything else in the Bible it also leads us to Jesus.