Appearing in the
Old Testament more frequently than any other name for
God, YHVH is thought of within
Jewish theology as a
proper name, as opposed to the titles
Shaddai, He who said "Enough!" (creating the
universe and ceasing its creation) or
Elohim, Lord. As God's own simple declaration of
existence and
permanence, the tetragrammaton is derived from the verb to be: past tense:
haya, present tense:
hoveh, future tense:
yihiyeh. However, some
Biblical scholars contend that the word YHVH was originally the predicate in the ubiquitous Biblical appelation
El YHVH, which would therefore translate as The Lord Causes to Be.
The
phenomes which compose the
Hebrew language predate by generations the institution of
nekudot, the small dots and slashes that specify weak
vowel sounds.
Torah scrolls are
traditionally written without these nekudot and, as such, the correct
pronunciation of
any word could only be known via an unbroken chain of transmission. In fact, many Biblical words are almost certainly pronounced differently today than they were originally, as the sounds made by some letters of the
Hebrew alphabet have changed. (For instance, the silent letter
ayin used to be gutteral.) As for the word YHVH, the tradition for its pronunciation has been lost, as a result of the fact that during the
second Temple era the tetragrammaton ceased to be spoken, for fear of violating the Biblical
injunction against taking God's name in vain.
Today, the word YHVH is replaced when spoken in
prayers and
ritual Torah readings by the word
Adonai, My Master. When spoken in a non-ritual context it is replaced by the word
Hashem, The Name. As opposed to Torah scrolls, printed editions of the Torah do include nekudot. For the sake of completeness, these editions place nekudot around YHVH, but these are the nikudot lifted from the word Adonai, or ADNY and the world is still meant to be read as Adonai or Hashem. The practice of this false nekud was originally enstated as a reminder to read YHVH as "Adonai", instead of attempting to pronounce it. However, when the letters Y-H-V-H are vowelated this way they do in fact spell out the word Yahovah, or the English
Jehovah.