Lord: YHWH

In the Bible, the word “Lord” is used as God’s name. The word “Lord” is a representation of the Hebrew “YHWH”.

God’s name YHWH consists of four consonants and is therefore sometimes referred to as the Tetragrammaton (“four letters” or “four letter word”). It is not odd that there are only consonants in God’s name, for the text of the Hebrew Bible originally consisted of nothing but consonants. People would read the vowels, but did not write them down. Vowel marks were later added to the text.

The meaning of the name was related to the Hebrew verb hayah, which means “to be”. God made himself known to Moses as YHWH, with the explanation, “I am who I am. […] I AM” (Exodus 3:14-15).

It is not known which vowels traditionally belonged to God’s name. It is usually assumed that they were “a” and “e”. YHWH would sound like Yahweh, in this case.

When Jewish people later came to add vowels to the text, they did not add “a” and “e” to YHWH, but the vowel marks for the Hebrew word Adonai, which means “the Lord” or “my Lord”. This was because the name YHWH was replaced by the word Adonai when it was read aloud, as in early Judaism the name of God was not spoken.

The Tetragrammaton YHWH with the vowel marks for Adonai sounds like “Jehovah”, but this is an erroneous combination of consonants (for YHWH) and vowels (for Adonai).

In the Septuagint the name of God was also replaced by Adonai. In later versions of the Septuagint, the name was represented by the Greek word kurios, which means “Lord”, just like Adonai.

Following the example of the Septuagint, nearly all later translations of the Bible, ancient and modern, represent the name of God, YHWH, with “Lord”. However, this is also the English translation for the word Adonai, which also occurs in the Old Testament as a name for God. To make it clear when it is a translation of YHWH, capitals are often used: “LORD”.