Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Jehovah
Not a name anyone in the Bible used, but a misreading of God's name produced centuries later.
Nobody in the Bible ever said this name. It is God's four Hebrew consonants read with the vowels of a completely different word, a reminder to say Lord instead. Sixteenth-century Christian scholars mistook the reading aid for the word itself.
No one in Scripture used this name. It is the consonants of YHWH read with the vowels of adonai, a reading aid for a name not to be pronounced, taken for a word by sixteenth-century Christian Hebraists. DDD calls it exactly that, the Masoretic form: the consonants of one word carrying the vowels of another. The scholarly "Yahweh" is itself a reconstruction, resting on early Greek transliterations of the name in Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 5.6.34.5) and Epiphanius of Salamis (Adv. Haer. 1.3.40.5), and not on any form written or vocalized that way in the Hebrew text.
- DDD s.v. "Yahweh," 910-919
