The Bible Unfiltered by Michael S. Heiser
Chapter 13 - What's In a Name?
“I am that I am”—God’s response when Moses asks for his name is famous for both its simplicity and its mystery (Exod 3:14 LEB). What exactly does it mean?
In Hebrew, God says ehyeh asher ehyeh (“I am that I am”). The verb form for “I am” is ehyeh. If you’ve studied a language, you know that verbs—action words—have grammatical person and number. With most languages, “number” refers to singular or plural; “person” refers to the subject of the verb. When I taught biblical languages, I would explain it this way: I am number one (first person). You are second fiddle (second person). Everyone else (he, she, or they) is a third party (third person).
In this sentence, the name of God, ehyeh, is a first-person, singular form of the verb “to be” (hayah). It’s a statement of self-existence—and, therefore, a denial of being created by any higher power or force.
Yet, the consonants used in ehyeh are not exactly the same as those found in the name of God in thousands of other places in the Hebrew Old Testament: y-h-w-h. These four consonants are known as the sacred Tetragrammaton (meaning “four letters”). Out of reverence, Israelites didn’t pronounce the name. In writing, they eventually provided the consonants with vowels for a different Hebrew word—adonay or “Lord.”1 English translations represent the sacred name with “LORD” in small capital letters. That actually isn’t a translation of the four consonants, though. It’s a reverential substitute for a word that was not spoken.
If ehyeh is the name God gives in Exodus 3:14, where does yhwh come from? For an answer, we need to take a closer look at the Hebrew’s meaning and the forms it can take. Ehyeh and yhwh come from the same verb, hayah (meaning “to be”). Ehyeh is the first-person form of the verb and is typically translated as “I am.” That same root word also appears as hawah, a standard spelling in texts older than the earliest manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament.2 The name yhwh is the third-person form of hawah.
All this suggests that yhwh should be pronounced yihweh, which would mean “he is” (since it’s in the third person). But that’s problematic. Elsewhere in the Bible, the divine name is shortened to two consonants (yh; e.g., Exod 15:2), and Hebrew scribes always added an “a” vowel to it (yah). So if the first half of the name is yah, it wouldn’t seem yihweh is the right option. That’s why scholars prefer yahweh as the spelling of the divine name. But, as you might guess, that’s disputed, too.
To unravel the debate over the mystery behind God’s name, we have to dive deeper into the original language. Stick with me here—even if you don’t know Hebrew, the possibilities present intriguing options for interpretation.
The most straightforward explanation is a technical one: Yahweh is a third-person form in what’s called the imperfect conjugation of the Hiphil stem. It sounds complicated, but this conjugation basically accounts for the added “y” and the yah spelling of the shorter name. Since the Hiphil stem is used to indicate the subject’s role as a cause for something else, the meaning of the divine name yahweh would be something like “he causes to be” or “he brings into existence.” This would denote God as the one who is creator.
But here’s the rub: There are no examples of this form of the verb hayah/hawah in all known ancient Hebrew writing samples except for the Old Testament. For that reason, some scholars don’t like this explanation.3 They want at least one parallel. For several linguistic reasons, they prefer to understand y-h-w-h simply as “he is” (yihweh) without regard to the shorter yah spelling 4.
In the end, both possibilities are workable. One (yihweh) maintains the idea that God is uncreated; he just is. The other (yahweh) proposes that the God of Israel is the one who brings all things into being. He is and he is the creator. Both are powerful theological statements.
Notes:
- The divine name should not be pronounced “Jehovah” (or “Yehovah” or “Yahovah”). “Jehovah” is a German spelling. In German, the letter “j” is pronounced like the English “y.” The pronunciation and spelling of Jehovah arose in the Middle Ages as a misreading of Hebrew scribal practices. The scribes refused to pronounce the divine name out of reverence. When they had to write it, they used the four consonants (yhwh) but swapped in the vowels from the word adonay (“lord”) to indicate that adonay should be said aloud, not any variation using the consonants yhwh. The resulting combination of yahovah or yehovah is an artificial word—a misunderstanding that resulted from combining consonants and vowels that were not meant to be read together.
- The Hebrew letters waw (“w”) and yod (“y”) came to be interchangeable in the spellings of some words.
- See Ernst Jenni, “Yahweh,” TLOT 522.
- In very ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, the yi- prefix derived from the ya- prefix. See Paul Joüon and Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, rev. Eng. ed. (Roma: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2006), 118 [§41e]. It is possible that this is what has happened with the divine name.
