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We Shouldn't Take God's Name in Vain. But What Is It?
The true pronunciation of YHWH has long been lost, partly because 2,500 years ago, Jews decided it was too sacred to say aloud, and failed to preserve the way it was said
God goes by many names in the Bible, but he only has one personal name, spelled using four letters - YHWH. It truly has become an ineffable name: we know neither how it was pronounced in antiquity, or what it meant.
The practical reason for the mystery of its original pronunciation is that Hebrew is written without vowels. Technically, almost any combination of vowel sounds could have been used with those consonants, thus many different pronunciations are possible.
The other reason is more spiritual. The pronunciation of other biblical words were meticulously preserved for us by an unbroken chain of tradition passed on orally from generation to generation, until eventually it was put down in
writing in Tiberias in the 10th century C.E. by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, who refined the system of diacritic marks that Hebrew still uses to indicate vowel sounds.
But, this was not the case with the name of God.
This may seem odd. Why would the Jews preserve the pronunciation of all other words in the Bible but neglect to preserve the pronunciation of the one most important word, which appears in the Bible some 6,600 times - the name of God himself?
The reason is that during the
Second Temple period, most likely in the early 5th century B.C.E., Jews decided that that name was ineffable, too holy to be uttered aloud. This was based on a particular interpretation of the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
The commandment probably intended, at its origin, merely to prohibit inappropriate invocation of God’s name, when swearing and the like, but during this time it began to be viewed as a prohibition against uttering the name in all but the most solemn of circumstances.
According to the
Mishnah (redacted in 200 C.E. but containing ancient traditions going back hundreds of years), the sacred name was only to be pronounced in the Temple in Jerusalem, and only in very specific occasions - by the High Priest on
Yom Kippur and when the priests sanctified the crowds with the Priestly Blessing.
When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 C.E. by Rome, to punish the Jews for their latest rebellion, there was no longer any context in which the uttering of God’s name was permissible. Since then, to this day, when the name YHWH arises during prayer or recitation outside the Temple, Jews read it aloud as '
adonai, meaning “my lord.” Thus the true pronunciation was eventually lost.
Still, linguists and biblical scholars have come up with a likely reconstruction based on ancient transcriptions, information gleaned from theophoric names, comparative material, and Hebrew grammar. The details of these analyses are too technical and frankly boring to even summarize here, but the upshot is that in all likelihood, in biblical times, the name was pronounced yah-weh, with soft a and soft (and slightly elongated) e.
The meaning of YHWH
Moving on from its missing pronunciation, what did the name YHWH mean?
Hebrew words, or words of any other Semitic language, usually have three-letter roots. Analysis of Semitic words starts with that trilateral root, which appears in other words with related meanings.
This is, at a very basic level, how Hebrew and other Semitic languages work. The root has a basic meaning, which gains specific meanings with the addition of other sounds (consonants and vowels).
Ancient graves found in Tiberias, where Jewish customs, and their pronunciation, were finally written downCredit: Gil Eliyahu
Take for instance the root SRK:
masrek means comb,
lehistarek means to comb (one's hair),
saruk is the passive past tense, combed;
srika means medical scan - combing through your innards, and so on.
In the case of god, the trilateral root seems to be HWH.
If this is true, and it probably is, the root HWH is likely a variant of the very common Hebrew root HYH. It is very common in Hebrew for W and Y to interchange. HYH simply means “being.”
Also, the format of the name YHWH is similar to that of causative verbs, verbs that indicate the subject is causing a change in the verb’s object, such as English’s spill or hire. So, if we accept the root as HWH or HYH, and assume it has causative structure - taken together, the name seems to mean “bring into being.” Or, “creator.”
This interpretation is supported to a certain extent by the Bible itself.
