The Unspeakable Name

Ron gasped.
“What?” said Harry.
“You said You-Know-Who’s name!” said Ron, sounding both shocked and impressed…
“I’m not trying to be brave or anything, saying the name,” said Harry, “I just never knew you shouldn’t.”
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone

In many stories, names have power. As Patrick Rothfuss writes in The Name of the Wind, “Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”

Some names are too sacred to be spoken. That was how the Israelites viewed God’s personal name. What was this name, and how did it come to be passed down to us?

The name God gives for himself is in the Hebrew four letters: yod-he-vav-he. Read from right to left, these letters look like this:

The Hebrew alphabet consists only of consonants—vowels are not considered letters, because they were not originally part of the written language. Vowel sounds were filled in intuitively as one read. Once the language was in danger of fading, however, scribes invented various dots and symbols arranged around consonantal letters to indicate vowel sounds for the sake of preserving proper pronunciation.

However, the yod-he-vav-he name of God was considered too holy to be spoken. When readers got to this word, they would say instead hashem (“the name”) or adonai (“Lord”). To remind readers of this, scribes began placing the vowels for Adonai around the yod-he-vav-he, so that it looked like this:

adonai:

Yod-he-vav-he with vowels from adonai (according to grammar rules, the first vowel, hateph pathach, becomes reduced to a vocal shewa; the second holem vowel is sometimes left out):

If yod-he-vav-he appeared in the text immediately next to adonai, it would be awkward to say adonai twice, so God’s name would be pronounced elohim (“God”) instead. To indicate this, scribes in these situations would use the vowels for elohim around the yod-he-vav-he:

elohim:

yod-he-vav-he with vowels from elohim (sometimes the holem vowel is left out and the hateph seghol is reduced to a vocal shewa, though not pictured as such here):

The point is, the vowels written in God’s name do not go with their consonants—the mismatch is a reminder that readers were not to say the yod-he-vav-he aloud. As a result, the actual pronunciation of God’s name is a mystery: we actually don’t know how it was said. The first English translators took the beginning consonantal sounds of the four letters, YHWH, and inserted the first three vowels from adonai to get “YaHoWaH,” which became the word Jehovah.

Our best guess is that the yod-he-vav-he was pronounced something like “Yahweh” based on shortened pronunciations of God’s name (“yah”), the verb on which the name is based having a final “eh” sound, and various Greek transcriptions.

But still, we don’t really know. And in a day and age when knowledge is so easy to be had, when names are scrawled on nametags and posted on office doors, it’s striking to recall these mysteries: that God is both someone who miraculously chose to reveal his own self to us, and yet is beyond our ability to fully comprehend.