Jehovah (Y: Bible

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JEHOVAH (YAHWEH[1]), in the Bible, the God of Israel. "Jehovah"


is a modern mispronunciation of the Hebrew name, resulting from
combining the consonants of that name, Jhvh, with the vowels of the
word ădōnāy, "Lord," which the Jews substituted for the proper name
in reading the scriptures. In such cases of substitution the vowels of
the word which is to be read are written in the Hebrew text with the
consonants of the word which is not to be read. The consonants of the
word to be substituted are ordinarily written in the margin; but
inasmuch as "Adonay" was regularly read instead of the ineffable
name Jhvh, it was deemed unnecessary to note the fact at every
occurrence. When Christian scholars began to study the Old
Testament in Hebrew, if they were ignorant of this general rule or
regarded the substitution as a piece of Jewish superstition, reading
what actually stood in the text, they would inevitably pronounce the
name Jěhōvāh. It is an unprofitable inquiry who first made this blunder;
probably many fell into it independently. The statement still commonly
repeated that it originated with Petrus Galatinus (1518) is erroneous;
"Jehova" occurs in manuscripts at least as early as the 14th century.

The form Jehovah was used in the 16th century by many


authors, both Catholic and Protestant, and in the 17th was zealously
defended by Fuller, Gataker, Leusden and others, against the
criticisms of such scholars as Drusius, Cappellus and the elder
Buxtorf. It appeared in the English Bible in Tyndale's translation of the
Pentateuch (1530), and is found in all English Protestant versions of
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the 16th century except that of Coverdale (1535). In the Authorized


Version of 1611 it occurs in Exod. vi. 3; Ps. lxxxiii. 15; Isa. xii., xxvi. 4,
beside the compound names Jehovah-jireh, Jehovah-nissi, Jehovah-
shalom; elsewhere, in accordance with the usage of the ancient
versions, Jhvh is represented by LORD (distinguished by capitals from
the title "Lord," Heb. adonay). In the Revised Version of 1885, Jehovah
is retained in the places in which it stood in the A. V., and is introduced
also in Exod. vi. 2, 6, 7, 8; Ps. lxviii. 20; Isa. xlix. 14; Jer. xvi. 21; Hab.
iii. 19. The American committee which cooperated in the revision
desired to employ the name Jehovah wherever Jhvh occurs in the
original, and editions embodying their preferences are printed
accordingly.

Several centuries before the Christian era the name Jhvh had
ceased to be commonly used by the Jews. Some of the later writers in
the Old Testament employ the appeliative Elohim, God, prevailingly or
exclusively: a collection of Psalms (Ps. xlii. lxxxiii.) was revised by an
editor who changed the Jhvh of the authors into Elohim (see e.g. xlv.
7; xlviii. 10; 1. 7; ii. 14); observe also the frequency of "the Most High,"
the "God of Heaven," "King of Heaven," in Daniel, and of "Heaven" in
First Maccabees. The oldest Greek versions (Septuagint), from the
third century B.C., consistently use Κύριος, Lord, where the Hebrew
has Jhvh, corresponding to the substitution of Adonay for Jhvh in
reading the original; in books written in Greek in this period
(e.g. Wisdom, 2 and 3 Maccabees), as in the New
Testament, Κύριος takes the place of the name of God. Josephus,
who as a priest knew the pronunciation of the name, declares that
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religion forbids him to divulge it; Philo calls it ineffable, and says that it
is lawful for those only whose ears and tongues are purified by wisdom
to hear and utter it in a holy place (that is, for priests in the Temple);
and in another passage, commenting on Lev. xxiv. 55 seq.: "If any
one, I do not say should blaspheme against the Lord of men and gods,
but should even dare to utter his name unseasonably, let him expect
the penalty of death."[2]

Various motives may have concurred to bring about the


suppression of the name. An instinctive feeling that a proper name for
God implicitly recognizes the existence of other gods may have had
some influence; reverence and the fear lest the holy name should be
profaned among the heathen were potent reasons; but probably the
most cogent motive was the desire to prevent the abuse of the name in
magic. If so, the secrecy had the opposite effect; the name of the god
of the Jews was one of the great names, in magic, heathen as well as
Jewish, and miraculous efficacy was attributed to the mere utterance
of it.

In the liturgy of the Temple the name was pronounced in the


priestly benediction (Num. vi. 27) after the regular daily sacrifice (in the
synagogues a substitute—probably Adonay was employed);[3] on the
Day of Atonement the High Priest uttered the name ten times in his
prayers and benediction. In the last generations before the fall of
Jerusalem, however, it was pronounced in a low tone so that the
sounds were lost in the chant of the priests.[4]
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The tradition that the utterance of the name in the daily


benedictions ceased with the death of Simeon the Just, two centuries
or more before the Christian era, perhaps arose from a
misunderstanding of MenaIioth, Iob; in any case it cannot stand
against the testimony of older and more authoritative texts.

[ 312 ]After the destruction of the Temple (A.D. 70) the liturgical


use of the name ceased, but the tradition was perpetuated in the
schools of the rabbis.[5] It was certainly known in Babylonia in the latter
part of the 4th century,[6] and not improbably much later. Nor was the
knowledge confined to these pious circles; the name continued to be
employed by healers, exorcists and magicians, and has been
preserved in many places in magical papyri. The vehemence with
which the utterance of the name is denounced in the Mishna He who
pronounces the Name with its own letters has no part in the world to
come![7] This suggests that this misuse of the name was not
uncommon among Jews.

The Samaritans, who otherwise shared the scruples of the Jews


about the utterance of the name, seem to have used it in judicial oaths
to the scandal of the rabbis.[8]

The early Christian scholars, who inquired what was the true
name of the God of, the Old Testament, had therefore no great
difficulty in getting the information they sought. Clement of Alexandria
(d. c. 212) says that it was pronounced Ιαουε.[9] Epiphanius (d. 404),
who was born in Palestine and spent a considerable part of his life
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there, gives Ιαβε (one cod. Ιανε).[10] Theodoret (d. c. 457),[11] born in

Antioch, writes that the Samaritans pronounced the name Ιαβε (in

another passage, Ιαβαι), the Jews Αία.[12] The latter is probably not


Jhvh but Ehyeh (Exod. iii. 14), which the Jews counted among the
names of God; there is no reason whatever to imagine that the
Samaritans pronounced the name Jhvh differently from the Jews. This
direct testimony is supplemented by that of the magical texts, in
which Ιαβε ζεβυθ (Jahveh Şebāōth), as well as Ιαβα, occurs
frequently.[13] In an Ethiopic list of magical names of Jesus, purporting
to have been taught by him to his disciples, Yāwē is found.[14] Finally,
there is evidence from more than one source that the modern
Samaritan priests pronounce the name Yahweh or Yahwa.[15]

There is no reason to impugn the soundness of this substantially


consentient testimony to the pronunciation Yahweh or Jahveh, coming
as it does through several independent channels. It is confirmed by
grammatical considerations. The name Jhvh enters into the
composition of many proper names of persons in the Old Testament,
either as the initial element, in the form Jeho- or Jo- (as in Jehoram,
Joram), or as the final element, in the form -jahu or -jah (as in
Adonijahu, Adonijah). These various forms are perfectly regular if the
divine name was Yahweh, and, taken altogether, they cannot be
explained on any other hypothesis. Recent scholars, accordingly, with
but few exceptions, are agreed that the ancient pronunciation of the
name was Yahweh (the first h sounded at the end of the syllable).
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Genebrardus seems to have been the first to suggest the


pronunciation Iahud,[16] but it was not until the 19th century that it
became generally accepted.

Jahveh or Yahweh is apparently an example of a common type


of Hebrew proper names which have the form of the 3rd pers. sing. of
the verb. e.g. Jabneh (name of a city), JabIn, Jamlek, Jiptal
(Jephthah), &c. Most of these really are verbs, the suppressed or
implicit subject being 'ēl, "numen, god", or the name of a god; cf.
Jabneh and Jabnē-ēl, Jiptāĥ and Jiptāĥ-ēl.

The ancient explanations of the name proceed from Exod. iii. 14,
15, where "Yahweh[17] hath sent me in;" v. 15 corresponds to "Ehyeh
hath sent me" in v. 14, thus seeming to connect the name Yahweh
with the Hebrew verb hâyâh, to become, to be. The Palestinian
interpreters found in this the promise that God would be with his
people (cf. v. 12) in future oppressions as he was in the present
distress, or the assertion of his eternity, or eternal constancy; the
Alexandrian translation Εγώ είμι ό ον... Ό ῶν απέσταλπέν

υμάς understands it in the more metaphysical sense of God's absolute


being. Both interpretations "He (who) is (always the same)" and "He
(who) is (absolutely, the truly existent)" import into the name all that
they profess to find in it; the one, the religious faith in God's
unchanging fidelity to his people, the other, a philosophical conception
of absolute being which is foreign both to the meaning of the Hebrew
verb and to the force of the Jense employed Modern scholars have
sometimes found in the name the expression of the aseity[18] of God;
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sometimes of his reality, in contrast to the imaginary gods of the


heathen. Another explanation which appears first in Jewish authors of
the middle ages and has found wide acceptance in recent times
derives the name from the causative of the verb; He (who) causes
things to be, gives them being, or calls events into existence, brings
them to pass; with many individual modifications of interpretation—
creator, life-giver, fulfiller of promises. A serious objection to this theory
in every form is that the verb hâyâh, "to be", has no causative stem in
Hebrew; to express the ideas which these scholars find in the name
Yahweh the language employs altogether different verbs.

This assumption that Yahweh is derived from the verb "to be", as
seems to be implied in Exod. iii. 14 seq., is not, however, free from
difficulty. "To be" in the Hebrew of the Old Testament is not hâwâh, as
the derivation would require, but hâyâh; and we are thus driven to the
further assumption that hâwâh belongs to an earlier stage of the
language, or to some, older speech of the forefathers of the Israelites.
This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable—and in Aramaic, a
language closely related to Hebrew, "to be" actually is hâwâ—but it
should be noted that in adopting it we admit that, using the name
Hebrew in the historical sense, Yahweh is not a Hebrew name. And,
inasmuch as nowhere in the Old Testament, outside of Exod. iii., is
there the slightest indication that the Israelites connected the name of
their God with the idea of "being" in any sense, it may fairly be
questioned whether, if the author of Exod. iii. 14 seq., intended to give
an etymological interpretation of the name Yahweh,[19] his etymology is
any better than many other paronomastic explanations of proper
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names in the Old Testament, or than, say, the connection of the


name Αρόλλων with απολοίων, απολίων in Plato's Cratylus, or the

popular derivation from απόλλυμ.

A root hâwâh is represented in Hebrew by the


nouns hôwâk (Ezek., Isa. xlvii. II) and kawwâh (Ps., Prov., Job)
"disaster, calamity, ruin".[20] The primary meaning is probably "sink
down, fall", in which sense—common in Arabic—the verb appears in
Job xxxvii. 6 (of snow falling to earth). A Catholic commentator of the
16th century, Hieronymus ab Oleastro, seems to have been the first to
connect the name Jehova with hôwâk interpreting it contritio, sine
pernicies (destruction of the Egyptians and Canaanites); Daumer,
adopting the same etymology, took it in a more general sense:
Yahweh, as well as Shaddai, meant Destroyer, and fitly expressed the
nature of the terrible god whom he identified with Moloch.

The derivation of Yahweh from hâwâh is formally


unimpeachable, and is adopted by many recent scholars, who
proceed, however, from the primary sense of the root rather than from
the specific meaning of the nouns. The name is accordingly
interpreted, He (who) falls (baetyl, baítylos, meteorite); or causes (rain
or lightning) to fall (storm god); or casts down (his foes, by his
thunderbolts). It is obvious that if the derivation be correct, the
significance of the name, which in itself denotes only "He falls" or "He
fells", must be learned, if at all, from early Israelitish conceptions of the
nature of Yahweh rather than from etymology.
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[ 313 ]A more fundamental question is whether the name


Yahweh originated among the Israelites or was adopted by them from
some other people and speech.[21] The biblical author of the history of
the sacred institutions (P) expressly declares that the name Yahweh
was unknown to the patriarchs (Exod. vi. 3), and the much older
Israelite historian (E) records the first revelation of the name to Moses
(Exod. iii. 13-15), apparently following a tradition according to which
the Israelites had not been worshippers of Yahweh before the time of
Moses, or, as he conceived it. had not worshipped the god of their
fathers under that name. The revelation of the name to Moses was
made at a mountain sacred to Yahweh (the mountain of God) far to the
south of Palestine, in a region where the forefathers of the Israelites
had never roamed, and in the territory of other tribes; and long after
the settlement in Canaan this region continued to be regarded as the
abode of Yahweh (Judg. v. 4; Deut. xxxiii. 2 sqq.; I Kings xix. 8 sqq.
&c). Moses is closely connected with the tribes in the vicinity of the
holy mountain; according to one account, he married a daughter of the
priest of Midian (Exod. i. 16 sqq.; iii. 1); to this mountain he led the
Israelites after their deliverance from Egypt; there his father-in-law met
him, and extolling Yahweh as greater than all the gods, offered (in his
capacity as priest of the place?) sacrifices, at which the chief men of
the Israelites were his guests; there the religion of Yahweh was
revealed through Moses, and the Israelites pledged themselves to
serve (;od according to its prescriptions. It appears, therefore, that in
the tradition followed by the Israelite historian the tribes within whose
pasture lands the mountain of God stood were worshippers of Yahweh
before the time of Moses; and the surmise that the name Yahweh
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belongs to their speech, rather than to that of Israel, has considerable


probability. One of these tribes was Midian, in whose land the
mountain of God lay. The Kenites also, with whom another tradition
connects Moses, seem to have been worshippers of Yahweh. It is
probable that Yahweh was at one time worshipped by various tribes
south of Palestine, and that several places in that wide territory (Horeb,
Sinai, Kadesh, &c.) were sacred to him; the oldest and most famous of
these, the mountain of God, seems to have lain in Arabia, east of the
Red Sea. From some of these peoples and at one of these holy
places, a group of Israelite tribes adopted the religion of Yahweh, the
God who, by the hand of Moses, had delivered them from Egypt.[22]

The tribes of this region probably belonged to some branch of


the great Arab stock, and the name Yahweh has, accordingly, been
connected with the Arabic hawd, "the void" (between heaven and
earth), "the atmosphere," or with the verb hawd, cognate with
Heb. hâwâh, "sink, glide down" (through space); haze-wd blow (wind).
"He rides through the air, He blows" (Welihausen), would be a fit name
for a god of wind and storm. There is, however, no certain. evidence
that the Israelites in historical times had any consciousness of the
primitive significance of the name.

The attempts to connect the name Yahweh with that of an Indo-


European deity (Jehovah-Jove, &c.), or to derive it from Egyptian or
Chinese, may be passed over. But one theory which has had
considerable currency requires notice, namely, that Yahweh, or Yahu,
Yaho,[23] is the name of a god worshipped throughout the whole, or a
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great part, of the area occupied by the Western Semites. In its earlier
form this opinion rested chiefly on certain misinterpreted testimonies in
Greek authors about a god Ιάω, and was conclusively refuted by
Baudissin; recent adherents of the theory build more largely on the
occurrence in various parts of this territory of proper names of persons
and places which they explain as compounds of Yahu or Yah.[24] The
explanation is in most cases simply an assumption of the point at
issue; some of the names have been misread; others are undoubtedly
the names of Jews. There remain, however, some cases in which it is
highly probable that names of nonIsraelites are really compounded
with Yahweh. The most conspicuous of these is the king of Hamath
who in the inscriptions of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) is called Yaubi'di and
Ilubi'di (compare Jehoiakim-Eliakim). Azriyau of Jaudi, also, in
inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser (745-728 B.C.), who was formerly
supposed to be Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah, is probably a king of the
country in northern Syria known to us from the Zenjirli inscriptions as
Ja'di.

Friedrich Delitzsch brought into notice three tablets, of the age of


the first dynasty of Babylon, in which he read the names of Ya-a'-ve-
ilu, Ya-ve-ilu, and Ya-ū-um-ilu ("Yahweh is God"), and which he
regarded as conclusive proof that Yahweh was known in Babylonia
before 2000 B.C.; he was a god of the Semitic invaders in the second
wave of migration, who were, according to Winckler and Delitzsch, of
North Semitic stock (Canaanites, in the linguistic sense).[25] We should
thus have in the tablets evidence of the worship of Yahweh among the
Western Semites at a time long before the rise of Israel. The reading of
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the names is, however, extremely uncertain, not to say improbable,


and the far-reaching inferences drawn from them carry no conviction.
In a tablet attributed to the I4th century B.C. which Sellin found in the
course of his excavations at Tell Taannuk (the Taanach of the O.T.) a
name occurs which may be read Ahi-Yawi (equivalent to Hebrew
Ahijah);[26] if the reading be correct, this would show that Yahweh was
worshipped in Central Palestine before the Israelite conquest. The
reading is, however, only one of several possibilities. The fact that the
full form Yahweh appears, whereas in Hebrew proper names only the
shorter Yahu and Yah occur, weighs somewhat against the
interpretation, as it does against Delitzsch's reading of his tablets.

It would not be at all surprising if, in the great movements of


populations and shifting of ascendancy which lie beyond our historical
horizon, the worship of Yahweh should have been established in
regions remote from those which it occupied in historical times; but
nothing which we now know warrants the opinion that his worship was
ever general among the Western Semites.

Many attempts have been made to trace the West Semitic Yahu
back to Babylonia. Thus Delitzsch formerly derived the name from an
Akkadian god, I or Ia; or from the Semitic nominative ending, Yau;
[27]
 but this deity has since disappeared from the pantheon of
Assyriologists. The combination of Yah with Ea, one of the great
Babylonian gods, seems to have a peculiar fascination for amateurs,
by whom it is periodically discovered. Scholars are now agreed that, so
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far as Yahu or Yah occurs in Babylonian texts, it is as the name of a


foreign god.

Assuming that Yahweh was primitively a nature god, scholars in


the 19th century discussed the question over what sphere of nature he
originally presided. According to some he was the god of consuming
fire; others saw in him the bright sky, or the heaven; still others
recognized in him a storm god, a theory with which the derivation of
the name from Heb. hâwâh or Arab. hawd well accords. The
association of Yahweh with storm and fire is frequent in the Old
Testament; the thunder is the voice of Yahweh, the lightning his
arrows, the rainbow his bow. The revelation at Sinai is amid the awe-
inspiring phenomena of tempest. Yahweh leads Israel through the
desert in a pillar of cloud and fire; he kindles Elijah's altar by lightning,
and translates the prophet in a chariot of fire. See also Judg. v. 4 seq.;

[ 314 ]Deut. xxxiii. I; Ps. xviii. 7-15; Hab. iii. 3-6. The cherub upon
which he rides when he flies on the wings of the wind (Ps. xviii. 10) is
not improbably an ancient mythological personification of the storm
cloud, the genius of tempest (cf. Ps. civ. 3). In Ezekiel the throne of
Yahweh is borne up on Cherubim, the noise of whose wings is like
thunder. Though we recognize in this poetical imagery the survival of
ancient and, if we please, mythical notions, we should err if we inferred
that Yahweh was originally a departmental god, specifically over
meteorological phenomena, and that this conception of him persisted
among the Israelites till very late times. Rather, as the god—or the
chief god—of a region and a people, the most sublime and impressive
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phenomena, the control of mightiest forces of nature, are attributed to


him. As the God of Israel Yahweh becomes its leader and champion in
war; he is a warrior, mighty in battle; but he is not a god of war in the
specific sense.

In the inquiry concerning the nature of Yahweh the Yahweh


Sebaoth (E.V. The LORD of Hosts) has had an important place. The
hosts have by some been interpreted of the armies of Israel
(see I Sam. xvii. 45, and note the association of the name in the Books
of Samuel, where it first appears, with the ark, or with war); by others,
of the heavenly hosts, the stars conceived of as living beings, later,
perhaps, the angels as the court of Yahweh and the instruments of his
will in nature and history (Ps. Ixxxix); or of the forces of the world in
general which do his bidding (cf. the common Greek
renderings Κύριος τῶν δυνάμεων and Κ. παντοκράτωρ, Universal
Ruler). It is likely that the name was differently understood in different
periods and circles; but in the prophets the hosts are clearly
superhuman powers. In many passages the name seems to be only a
more solemn substitute for the simple Yahweh, and as such it has
probably often been inserted by scribes. Finally, Sebaoth came to
treated as a proper name (cf. Ps. Ixxx. 5, 8, 20), and as such very
common in magical texts.

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