Scholars Have Discovered How to Pronounce the True Name of God
Today, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims simply call their god “God,” but it is fairly common knowledge that the texts of the Hebrew Bible refer to the God of Israel by his proper name, which, in Hebrew, is written as four letters: יהוה (_YHWH_), known as the tetragrammaton. At the time when the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written, the people of Israel and Judah regularly used this name to refer to their god. By the first century CE, however, a taboo forbade ordinary Jews from saying the proper name of God aloud. Instead, when a Jewish person was reading the Hebrew Bible and came across this name, they would substitute either the word אֲדֹנָי (_ăḏonāi_), which means “my Lord,” or הַשֵּׁם (_ha-shem_), which means “the name.” For this reason, English translations of the Hebrew Bible traditionally render the proper name of God as “the LORD.”
At the time of the Hebrew Bible’s composition, the written forms of the Hebrew and Aramaic languages recorded only consonants, not vowels. Much later, between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, the compilers of the standard text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Masoretic Text, added symbols known as “vowel points” to indicate the vowels of most words, but, when the tetragrammaton occurred in the text, they gave it the vowel points of _ăḏonāi_ , because that was the word a reader was supposed to substitute for it, and did not preserve the vowels of the name itself. For this reason, most Christian seminaries and Jewish rabbinical schools teach that no one today knows how the name of God was pronounced.
This makes for a good story, and it was actually true at one time. For roughly the past century now, though, scholars have actually had compelling evidence that the ancient peoples of Israel and Judah pronounced the proper name of their god _Yahweh_. There is _slight_ ambiguity about the exact vowel qualities, but not much. In this post, I will explain the ancient evidence supporting this scholarly reconstruction. To do this, I will have to use some linguistics jargon, but I will do my best to explain the meanings of all the terms I use.
**The proper name of God**
As I discuss in this post I wrote in April 2022, the earliest known attestation of the name יהוה (YHWH) that can be securely dated and that the majority of scholars agree is genuine occurs on the Mesha Stele, which dates to around 840 BCE. The name YHWH also occurs 6,828 times in the _Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia_ , the standard modern critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. It appears in every book of the Hebrew Bible, except for Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, as well as numerous inscriptions dated to the period of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
_ABOVE: Photographfrom Wikimedia Commons showing the earliest generally-agreed-on occurrence of the divine name YHWH on the Mesha Stele, dating to around 840 BCE_
The ancient Judeans also used a shortened, three-letter form of the divine name: יהו (YHW). This form occurs in many Yahwistic theophoric names in the Hebrew Bible, and it is the regular form of the divine name that is used Aramaic papyri dating to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE from the Judean community on the Nile island of Elephantine in Upper Egypt.
_ABOVE: Photo of an Aramaic letter from the Elephantine Papyri dated 407 BCE, written by the priest Yedoniah to Bagoas, the governor of Judah, requesting permission to rebuild the Temple to the god YHW on Elephantine_
**How the tetragrammaton’s consonants were pronounced**
Of the three distinct consonant letters that occur in the divine name, the letters yōd ⟨י⟩ and hē ⟨ה⟩ were pronounced exactly the same in Biblical Hebrew as they are in Modern Hebrew. Yōd ⟨י⟩ represents the voiced palatal approximant /j/, which is represented in English by the consonantal ⟨y⟩ as in the word _y_ ellow. Meanwhile, hē ⟨ה⟩ normally represents the voiceless glottal fricative /h/, which is represented in English by the letter ⟨h⟩. It can also, however, serve as a _mater lectionis_ , a consonant that indicates the place of a vowel, which is probably what it is doing in the divine name.
The third letter in the divine name, wāw or vāv ⟨ו⟩, originally represented the voiced labial-velar approximant /w/, which is represented in English by the letter ⟨w⟩ as in the word _w_ ant. In Modern Hebrew, however, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, which is represented in English by the letter ⟨v⟩ as in the word _v_ ampire.
We know that wāw originally represented the /w/ sound in ancient Hebrew for several reasons. First, /w/ is considered the semivowel equivalent of the close back rounded vowel /u/, and, in Biblical Hebrew, the letter ⟨ו⟩ is frequently used as a _mater lectionis_ for /u/. This makes perfect sense if the consonant it represented in Biblical Hebrew was the semivowel /w/, but it wouldn’t make any sense at all if the consonant it represented were /v/.
Furthermore, in many Biblical Hebrew words where the open front unrounded vowel sound /a/ precedes the letter wāw ⟨ו⟩, the two sounds contract into the single mid back rounded vowel /o/. Once again, this makes perfect sense if wāw ⟨ו⟩ represented the semivowel /w/ in Biblical Hebrew but wouldn’t make sense at all if it represented /v/.
Finally, the Hebrew alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and, in all the other alphabets derived from the Phoenician alphabet, the letter equivalent to wāw ⟨ו⟩ represents /w/. Examples of this include the archaic Greek letter digamma ⟨ϝ⟩, the Syriac letter wāw ⟨ܘ⟩, and the Arabic letter wāw ⟨و⟩, all of which are pronounced /w/. In fact, some Jewish communities in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, including Yemenite Jews, have retained the ancient pronunciation of wāw ⟨ו⟩ in Hebrew as /w/ into modern times.
It is extremely easy and common for /w/ to shift over time to become /v/, but the reverse phenomenon is far less common. In Classical Latin, the letter ⟨v⟩ originally represented the /w/ sound, but, in late antiquity, the letter shifted to /v/. Similarly, in Old and Middle High German the letter ⟨w⟩ represented the /w/ sound, but, at some point between Middle and Modern High German, the letter shifted to /v/. The pronunciation of the letter ⟨ו⟩ as /v/ in Modern Hebrew is almost certainly the result of such a shift.
_ABOVE: Photograph taken by Ephraim Moses Lilien sometime between c. 1908 and c. 1918 showing Yemenite Jewish elders in Ottoman Palestine studying the Torah_
**How the tetragrammaton’s vowels were pronounced**
Despite the fact that the Masoretic Text does not provide vowel points for the tetragrammaton, scholars still have a fairly good idea of what its original vowels were, because there are surviving ancient transcriptions of the name of the god of Israel into _Greek_ , a language that _did_ consistently indicate vowels, from the time when the divine name was still known and spoken.
The early Christian philosopher and theologian Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE), relying on older sources, transcribes the divine name into Greek in his _Stromateis_ 5.6.34 as either Ἰαού (_Iaoú_) or Ἰαοῦε (_Iaoûe_). In Clement’s time, the latter of these would most likely have been pronounced /ja:u:ɛ/ (_Yah-oo-eh_), which is really the closest possible transcription a person could make of _Yahweh_ into second- or third-century CE Greek.
(Greek-language authors struggled to render the third consonant of the divine name in their alphabet, since the Greek alphabet by the Hellenistic Period did not have any letter that made the /w/ sound, since the archaic letter digamma ⟨ϝ⟩ had dropped out of use by then.)
Several Christian authors writing in the fifth century CE transcribe the divine name into Greek as Ἰαβε (_Iave_), which, by that time, most likely would have been pronounced /ja:vɛ/ (_Yah-veh_). This most likely reflects a late antique pronunciation of the divine name as _Yahveh_ , after the Hebrew letter ⟨ו⟩ had shifted from /w/ to /v/ in the majority of dialects.
The most common ancient Greek-letter transcription of the name of the god of Israel, however, is Ιαω (_Iaō_), which is most likely based on the shortened form YHW. In Hellenistic or Roman-period Greek, this would have been pronounced /ja:o:/ (_Yah-oh_). It is likely that an /h/ would have been pronounced between the first and second vowels, but Greek of this period did not have a letter to represent the /h/ sound, so the /h/ is omitted.
The earliest surviving attestation of this transcription is most likely 4Q120 frg. 20, a fragment of a papyrus scroll found at Qumran that dates to the first century BCE and bears the text of the Greek Septuagint translation of the Book of Leviticus 4:26–28. This also happens to be one of the earliest surviving Septuagint manuscripts. At the time the manuscript was copied, some Jews may have actually still been speaking the tetragrammaton out loud during prayer and Torah readings.
_ABOVE: Photographfrom Wikimedia Commons showing 4Q120 frg. 20, a fragment of the papyrus scroll found at Qumran dating to the first century BCE, bearing the Greek Septuagint translation of Leviticus 4:26–28, with the divine name transcribed into Greek letters as Ιαω_
As I mentioned earlier, the Masoretic Text does not provide vowel points for the tetragrammaton when it occurs on its own. It _does_ , however, provide vowel points for the shortened form YHW when it occurs as an element in theophoric names like אֵלִיָּהוּ (_ʾĒlīyyāhū_) or יִרְמְיָהוּ (_Yirmĭyāhū_). The vowel points added to these names reflect their pronunciation at the time the Masoretic Text was compiled, which may or may not reflect their pronunciation in earlier, Biblical times.
The discrepancy between the Greek transcription _Yaho_ and the Masoretic Text’s _Yahu_ is very slight, since /o/ and /u/ are both back rounded vowels (i.e., vowels that are pronounced near the back of the vocal tract with rounded lips). The difference between them is that /o/ is a _close-mid_ back rounded vowel, whereas /u/ is a _close_ back rounded vowel, meaning they are both on the closed side of the vowel spectrum, but /u/ is slightly more closed than /o/. It would have been very easy for the pronunciation to have shifted from one to the other.
**Conclusion**
Based on all this evidence, we can be quite confident that the name YHWH was pronounced /ja:wɛ:/ (_Yahweh_) in antiquity and its shortened form YHW was pronounced either /ja:ho:/ (_Yaho_) or /ja:hu:/ (_Yahu_), depending on whether you take the Greek transcriptions or the Masoretic Text’s vowel points as more authoritative.
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## Author: Spencer McDaniel
I am a historian mainly interested in ancient Greek cultural and social history. Some of my main historical interests include ancient religion and myth; gender and sexuality; ethnicity; and interactions between Greeks and foreign cultures. I hold a BA in history and classical studies (Ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature), with departmental honors in history, from Indiana University Bloomington (May 2022) and an MA in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis University (May 2024). View all posts by Spencer McDaniel
One good example of ancient Judeans who did not see the Tetragamon as taboo: names like Gadal-Jama (the last word pronounced something like Yahwa) talesoftimesforgotten.com/2025/11/26/scholars-have... #philology #ancientReligion #ancentJudaism
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