What's God's name and why does it matter?

Jehovah? Yahweh? LORD? Jah? Adonai? HaShem? What's God's name?

There is often a good bit of confusion regarding the question of God's name among readers of the Bible.  In fact, some religious groups have derived their group's name from one of the names above (you can probably guess at least one of them!).  But why all the confusion?  Where did it start?  The answer, as is often the case, lies with tradition. 

When reading an English Bible there are many instances in the Old Testament where we find the word "LORD" (all caps). But older English Bibles (as well as the New World Translation used by Jehovah's Witnesses) have "Jehovah" instead. To make it even more confusing, if you pick up some English translations of the Hebrew Bible done by modern Jewish scholars, you'll find "ADONAI" or "HaShem" instead. And if you grab a Bible Dictionary or commentary, you'll see God referred to in those passages as "Yahweh" or "YHWH."

So what's going on?  Where did all these terms come from and what's God's actual name?  The following is a brief summary of how these changes came about.

When God revealed His name to Moses at the Burning Bush, He gave Moses His name to tell to the Hebrews in Egypt:

God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" (Exodus 3:14)

The Hebrew word that is translated by "I AM" is the word "Yahweh": 

Four Hebrew letters, yod-he-vav-he, Y-H-W-H, comprise God's name.  (As we'll see below, Hebrew wouldn't have written vowels until nearly 1000 years after the time of Jesus.)  These letters are the consonants of the word "Yahweh," a form of the Hebrew verb "to be"; thus the name God gives to Moses to tell the Israelites--"I AM." 

Centuries after this conversation between God and Moses, before the time of Jesus, the belief arose among pious Jews, that God's revealed name was NEVER to be spoken aloud--even when reading the Bible. So a tradition developed that whenever one was reading a passage in which the Divine name (or tetragrammaton) appeared, the reader would instead say "Adonai" ("my Lord"):

This solution worked for centuries...until Biblical Hebrew began to die out as a spoken language. It was around this time, ~1000 A.D. or so, that a group of Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes (MAA-zuh-reets) developed a way to write out the vowels, which up until then had simply been known by the reader but not written out.  They did this by using small dots and lines in and around the letters to show which vowel sound was to be pronounced with which letter:

 This allowed the majority of Jews whose native language was not Biblical Hebrew to read the Hebrew text and know how to pronounce the words correctly. This was a great innovation! 

HOWEVER, the belief that it was forbidden to say the Divine name out loud, lest one inadvertantly take God's name in vain (something prohibited by the 3rd of the Ten Commandments), had continued throughout the centuries.  So, when the Masoretes came to passages where "YHWH" appeared in the text, they left the consonants as they were (because the letters were not to be altered under any circumstances), but put different vowels than the ones that would spell "Yahweh" beneath them. This way, the reader would come to this word and instead of accidentally pronouncing God's name("Yahweh"), he would see the strange vowels and know to say the word they belonged to instead.  And what word would the reader say instead of "Yahweh"?  The word they'd said in place of it for centuries--"Adonai".  The Masoretes used some of the vowels from the Hebrew word "Adonai" and stuck them under the consonants of the Hebrew word "Yahweh." The result looked like this:

Centuries later, when Christians started translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin and later into English, they simply wrote out the Hebrew word as it appeared--vowels and all.   Therefore, they wrote the vowels from "Adonai" into the consonants of "Yahweh" and ended up with a hybrid word that would had never been spoken by anyone--"Ye-ho-wa"...or as we know it, "Jehovah." (When going from Hebrew to Latin to English, Y's became J's and W's became V's)

Newer Bible translations, realizing the error that earlier translatons had made, wanted to get as close in translating God's name as possible to the way it would have been read in the context of Ancient Israel. So they did the English equivalent of the Masoretic practice. Whenever the word "Yahweh" appeared in the text, the translators used the English equivalent of "Adonai"--"Lord."  But in order to alert the reader that the Hebrew word is really the Divine Name, YHWH, rather than the word "adonai", the translators put it in all caps: "LORD"

Most modern English translations such as the TNIV, ESV or NRSV talk about this in their prefaces.  Or for more in-depth and technical grammatical discussions one can pick up a commentary on Exodus 3 and it will likely include a section on the tetragrammaton in translation through history.  However, the bottom line is that "Jehovah", rather than being God's name--as some adamantly claim!--is based on a medieval translation error due to unfamiliarity with the Hebrew language.  It's no more God's name that "Abracadabra."

But a more important issue remains.  Is it really even important that God has a name??  Is a name necessary for the One True God who created the universe and everything in it?? 

Yes and yes! 

In the Ancient Near East, one's name often represented one's character, identity or essence.  Your name was your identity and told the world something about you.  Thus, when God tells Moses that His name is "YHWH", He is letting him know that
"He IS!" 

Period. 

He is...
...the Creator of all that is! 
 

...the ontological foundation upon which everything else rests! 
 

...the one from whom the very concept of "being" originates! 

In the polytheistic world within which He appeared to Moses, God's identifying Himself as such was a much-needed reassurance that the task at hand for Moses to complete, as mind-boggling as it seemed at the time, would be completed.  Who else could garantee that a prince-turned-shepherd could force the most powerful ruler in the known world to release his nation's primary slave workforce??   

"HE IS" indeed!