יהוה GOD'S INEFFIBLE NAME

יהוה


The term Tetragrammaton (from Greek τετραγράμματον, meaning "[a word] having four letters")^[1] refers to the proper name of the God of Israel YHWH (Hebrew: יהוה‎) used in the Hebrew Bible.

Tetragrammaton

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For other uses, see Tetragrammaton (disambiguation).

This article is about the literary manifestations of the name of God in Hebrew. For other attributes of the name of God, see Yahweh,Jehovah, God in Judaism, and God in Abrahamic religions.

Occurrences and uses

The Tetragrammaton occurs 6,828 times in the Hebrew text of both the Biblia Hebraica and

 Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.^[2] It does not appear in the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes,

 or Esther. It first appears in the Hebrew text in Genesis 2:4.^[2][3] The letters, properly

 read from right to left (in Biblical Hebrew), are:

Hebrew	Letter name	Pronunciation
י	Yodh	"Y"
ה	He	"H"
ו	Waw	"W" or placeholder for "O"/"U" vowel (see mater lectionis)
ה	He	"H" (or often a silent letter at the end of a word)

These four letters are usually transliterated from Hebrew as IHVH in Latin, JHWH in German,

French and Dutch, and JHVH/YHWH in English. This has been variously rendered as "Yahweh"

 or as "Jehovah", based on the Latin form of the term,^[4] while the Hebrew text does not clearly

 indicate the omitted vowels.

In English translations, it is often rendered in capital and small capital letters as "the Lord", 

following Jewish tradition which reads the word as "Adonai" ("Lord") out of respect for the name of God 

and the interpretation of the commandment not to take the name of God in vain. The word "haŠem",

 'the Name' is also used in Jewish contexts; in Samaritan, "Šemå" is the normal substitution

The spelling of the Tetragrammaton and connected forms in the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Bible, with vowel points shown in red.