In English, “Jehovah” is pronounced jih-HOH-vuh, with the stress on the middle syllable, and “Yahweh” is pronounced YAH-weh, with the stress on the first. Both are English attempts to say the same four Hebrew letters, YHWH, and neither can claim to be the sound ancient Israel used with certainty. The reason is simple and a little sobering. Hebrew was written without vowels; Jewish readers stopped pronouncing the name aloud in the centuries before Christ, saying Adonai instead; and so, by the time anyone thought to record the vowels, the tradition of saying the name had already fallen silent. What survives is the four consonants, a set of borrowed vowel signs, a handful of early Greek transcriptions, and the shape of Hebrew names that contain the divine name. From those, scholars reconstruct “Yahweh” as the probable sound. “Jehovah” is the older English reading of the same letters.
How a name loses its vowels
Ancient Hebrew writing recorded consonants and left vowels to the reader’s memory. For most words that was no difficulty; the language was spoken every day, and the reader supplied the sounds. The four letters of the divine name were different. Out of reverence, and to guard against any misuse of the name, Jewish readers came to avoid pronouncing it. By the late Second Temple period the custom was well established: when the reader reached YHWH in the text, he said Adonai, “my Lord”. The name was still spoken in the Temple itself on the Day of Atonement, according to the Mishnah, but with the Temple’s destruction in AD 70 that use ended too.
A word that is never said is a word whose sound cannot be handed on. Within a few generations the pronunciation was a matter of learned tradition rather than common knowledge, and within a few centuries it was uncertain even to the learned. The entry on the Tetragrammaton in Jewish tradition describes this reverence in more detail and without disparagement; it was an attempt to honour a command, not to hide a name.
The vowel points, and where “Jehovah” came from
Between about the sixth and tenth centuries after Christ, Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes devised a system of dots and strokes to record the vowels of the biblical text. When they reached the four letters of the name, they did not write its vowels, since those were not to be said. They wrote instead the vowels of the word the reader was to substitute, Adonai (or, where Adonai already stood next to the name, the vowels of Elohim, “God”). A reader trained in the synagogue understood the signal at once.
A Christian reader trained in the schools did not. From the later Middle Ages, scholars reading the pointed Hebrew text took the consonants and the borrowed vowels together as a single word, and pronounced it roughly Yehowah. In Latin that became Iehouah, and in English, from Tyndale’s Pentateuch of 1530 onward, “Jehovah”. The word is a hybrid: the consonants of the name with the vowels of a different word. That fact is often stated as though it discredited the form. It does not. Every English form of a Hebrew name is a compromise of some kind, and “Jehovah” has carried the meaning of the name faithfully in English Bibles and hymns for five centuries. But it is fair to say that no Israelite ever pronounced the name that way.
The evidence for “Yahweh”
The reconstruction “Yahweh” draws on evidence from outside the Masoretic text.
Greek transcriptions. Early Christian writers occasionally wrote the name in Greek letters. Clement of Alexandria, around AD 200, gives a form usually read as Iaoue; Theodoret, in the fifth century, reports that the Samaritans pronounced the name Iabe. Greek had no letter for the Hebrew sound w, and b was the nearest substitute; both forms point to something like Yahweh.
Names that contain the name. Hebrew personal names often included a short form of the divine name. At the beginning of a name it appears as Yeho- or Yo- (Jehoshaphat, Joshua, Jonathan); at the end as -yahu or -yah (Elijah, Isaiah, Hezekiah). The final form Yah also stands alone in the Psalms, most familiarly in “Hallelujah”, “praise Yah”:
Praise ye Jehovah. Praise, O ye servants of Jehovah, Praise the name of Jehovah. Blessed be the name of Jehovah From this time forth and for evermore. From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same Jehovah’s name is to be praised.
— Psalm 113:1-3 (ASV)
The first “Praise ye Jehovah” in that psalm is the Hebrew Hallelu-Yah. The ASV also renders the free-standing Yah of Psalm 68:4 as Jehovah:
Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: Cast up a highway for him that rideth through the deserts; His name is Jehovah; and exult ye before him.
— Psalm 68:4 (ASV)
The first syllable Yah is therefore secure. The second syllable is the reconstructed part.
Grammar. Exodus 3 ties the name to the verb “to be”. A third-person form of that verb in an older pattern would be pronounced roughly yahweh, which fits the Greek transcriptions and the theophoric names. Gesenius, the great nineteenth-century Hebrew grammarian, argued the case, and most Hebrew scholars since have accepted it as the most probable solution.
What certainty is possible
It is worth being precise about what is and is not known. The consonants are certain. The first syllable, Yah, is certain. That the vowels under the name in the Hebrew Bible belong to Adonai, not to the name, is certain. That “Yahweh” is closer to the ancient sound than “Jehovah” is very probable. That “Yahweh” is exactly the ancient sound is not known and cannot be, short of a discovery that has not been made.
A reader can therefore say either form in good conscience, so long as the claim made for it is honest. What the name means, and whose name it is, does not depend on the vowels; Scripture itself says of the name only that it endures:
Thy name, O Jehovah, endureth for ever; Thy memorial name, O Jehovah, throughout all generations.
— Psalm 135:13 (ASV)
Where Christians differ
Some Christians hold that, since “Yahweh” is more likely correct, it should replace “Jehovah” in speech and in Bibles; several modern scholarly translations have done so. Others hold that the traditional English form should be kept, both because it is what the church has sung for centuries and because a reconstruction is still a reconstruction. Most English Bibles avoid the question by printing LORD. Jehovah’s Witnesses use “Jehovah” exclusively and regard the use of the name as essential; mainstream Christians see the choice of form as a matter of liberty. This site uses “Jehovah” as its headword because it is the form English readers know, and treats “Yahweh” as the probable ancient sound rather than as an error to be corrected. The entry Is God’s name Jehovah or Yahweh? lays out the choice more fully.
For reflection
Say the name, in whichever form your Bible and your church use, and then read Exodus 3:15, where God calls it his memorial to all generations. What is remembered is not a set of vowels but a God who is, who is present, and who keeps his word. If uncertainty about the sound troubles you, let it lead to humility rather than anxiety, and to the company of a congregation where the name is honoured in worship week by week.
References
- Gesenius, Hebrew Grammar (ed. Kautzsch, 1910).
- Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906).
- Clement of Alexandria, Stromata.
- Theodoret of Cyrus, Quaestiones in Exodum.
- The Mishnah, tractate Yoma.
- The Leningrad Codex.
Lexicon answers from the Bible and public-domain reference works. It is a study aid and is not affiliated with any organisation.