The Divine Name

When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, Moses gave excuses as to why he could not return to Egypt to lead the people out of slavery. His second objection was that the people would want to know the name of God. God's answer was three-fold. He first said, "I AM who I AM." Then he said to tell them, "I AM has sent me to you." The third time, he said to tell them, "YHWH, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me...." The name YHWH seems to be built off of the same word as I AM ('HYH in Hebrew). It means something like "The Being." There is a question of how to pronounce the name YHWH. We know that the first syllable was pronounced YaH from the word HallaluYaH. That is actually two words in Hebrew that mean "Praise YaH," the short form of God's name. It is often found in the Psalms. At some point between the Old and New Testaments, Jews took the command, "You shall not take the name of YHWH your God in vain," very literally. They substituted the word "Lord" for the name so that they could never use it in a vain way. It is found in most English translations as LORD or sometimes GOD in the Old Testament and simply as Lord in the New Testament. In Latin the four letters of God's name were written IHVH, where the I was pronounced as a Y and the V was pronounced as a W. Later the I when used as a consonant was written as a J, thus JHVH. Now Hebrew is written using consonants, not vowels, but in the middle ages, vowel markings were made above and below the letters so new readers could pronounce the words. When it came to YHWH, the vowels of the Hebrew word for Lord were used to indicate to the reader that he was to say the word for Lord rather than God's name. Thus we get the word JeHoVaH in English, from the Latin consonants and Hebrew vowels. There is dispute among scholars as to how the divine name was originally pronounced, but YaHWeH is often used. Now the letter W, a semi-vowel, can also be used as an O or U. Names that in English end in "-iah," like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Josiah, and others, end in YaHU in Hebrew, another short form of God's name. Since Hebrew words that end in H often end with the sound -aH, perhaps the name was pronounced YaHUaH or YaHOaH. But whether one says, JeHoVah, YaHWeH, YaHUaH, or simply LORD, the intent is the same.

Sometimes people see Jesus saying something like "I am the bread of life" and they are tempted to focus on the "I am" part of the saying as a sign of his divinity. Truly, when Jesus said, "Before Abraham was, I AM," he was making such a claim. But it is a mistake to think that every time the Greek phrase for "I am" (egō eimi) occurs, it is a claim of divinity. The two words in Greek can also be translated "it's me." Thus when Isaiah encounters God high and lifted up on a throne in chapter 6, in the Greek Old Testament he responds to God's question of who will go for him with egō eimi, that is, "it's me." Further, the translators of the Greek Old Testament rendered "I AM who I AM" with "I AM the Being" (egō eimi ho ōn), using the present participle of the verb "to be." Then they translate "the Being (ho ōn) has sent me to you." The phrase ho ōn is found in Romans 9:5 where it is usually translated "who is." A literal rendering, however, would be: "from whom [is] the Christ according to the flesh, the Being over all, God blessed for ever." Did Paul have the Exodus passage in mind when he wrote this? It is an interesting thought.