YHWH

YHWH

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For the unique God of Judaism, see the articles Adonai and Elohim. For the deity of the ancient Near East,see Yahweh.

The Tetragram in Phoenician,Ancient Aramaic and Square Hebrew.

Is the Tetragram (Ancient Greek: ‘Tetragr’mmaton’, ‘four-letter word’),the theorym of the deity ofIsrael,composed of the letters yōḏ (‘ ), ‘h’, ‘wow’, ‘h’ ()and transcribed YHWH in French .

Appearing nearly 7,000 times throughout the Hebrew Bible and presented as the “own name” of theElohim of Judaism,it could be derived from the trilitter root in Hebrew: ‘HYH, ‘being’)1. Considered supreme holiness and declared ineffable because of the third commandment (“not to pronounce the divine name in vain”) around the 3rd century,it is substituted in prayers or the reading of the Torah by Adonai (Hebrew: “my Lord”), by HaElohim (Hebrew: “God”) and by HaShem (Hebrew: “The Name”).

Some Christian translations of the Bible have sometimes transcribed it by “Yahweh,” “Yahweh,” “Jehovah” or “Jehovah.” Since the pontificate of Benedict XVI,theCatholic Church has advocated, among other things out of respect for the Jews, to no longer pronounce “Yahweh” but to use the expression “the Lord” instead.2 according to the use of the Vulgate, which itself follows the late copies of the Seventy, in which the Tetragram had ended up being replaced by Kyrios, “Lord”). Since the Bible of Olivétan (1535), most Protestant translations retain the term “The Lord,” considered closer to the Hebrew meaning.3.

The four-letter name in the Bible[ | change the code]

The first explicit occurrence of the four-letter name is in Genesis 2:4 (the first chapter uses “Elohim”). The name then appears more than 1,400 times in the Torah (with 153 occurrences in the Book of Genesis,364 in the Book of Exodus,285 in Leviticus,285 387 in the Book of Numbers and 330 in the Deuteronomy), nearly 2,700 in the prophetic books and just under 1,300 times in the Scriptures[ref. necessary] .

The four consonants[ | change the code]

The Tetragram on the Stele of Mesha, Louvre Museum.

The YHWH form corresponds to an atypical verbal flexion to the causative form of the imperfect Hebrew of the trilitter root, HYH (“being, becoming, arriving, making it become”). This was already the opinion of Jewish grammarians of the Middle Ages,reinforced by that of Baruch Spinoza.

The earliest known epigraphic mention of the Tetragram is a theophore name,that is, “wearing [the name of] God,” dated 820 BC on the stele of Tel Dan. A more explicit inscription, dated 810 BC,was found on the Mesha stele4,5.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), the Tetragram appears 5,410 times in Tanakh. These occurrences are divided into 1,419 in the Torah6, 2,696 in the Prophets(Nevi’im)and 1,295 in the Scriptures(Ketouvim)7. For Douglas Knight (2011)8, the Tetragram is written 6,828 times in the Editions of Kittel and Stuttgart. The BDB dictionary shows a total of 6,518 occurrences.

In the Hebrew scriptures, the divine personal name appears nearly 7,000 times.

Forbidden pronunciation in Judaism[modifying | change the code]

The Jews imposed a ban on pronouncing the Tetragram, based on the Third Commandment: “You will not invoke the name of YHWH your God in vain” (Ex 20:7). Chief Rabbi Lazare Wogue, translator of the Torah, states: “As for the Holy Tetragram, we know that Judaism, from time immemorial and in all its sects without exception, refrained from pronouncing it in its true form: the Rabbanites or Pharisees said Adônai, the Samaritans Schimâ »9. When the Tetragram is inscribed in the Hebrew scriptures, other words are substituted for oral, mostoften Adonai (“my Lord”) but occasionally Elohim (“Powers”)10. This substitution11 explains the vowel points used in several transcriptions of the Pentateal according to whether one should read Adonai or Elohim. In the conversation, We preferably use HaShem (“The Name,” cf. Lv 24:11). At school, they also say “Eloqim.” During the blessings, at the synagogue or at the family table, participants greet the pronunciation of “Adonai” with the phrase “Baroukh Hou or Barukh Shemo” (“Blessed [either] He and Blessed [or] His Name”).

Silver leaf(c. 600 BCE) with priestly blessing(Nb 6:24-26):“May YHWH bless you and keep you.”

The exact pronunciation of the Tetragram is not possible, which makes sense given the prohibition on it. On the other hand, the Name is written by means of the consonants, which are fixed. Such a process is called “Quetiv Quéré12“It indicates that a surrogate name is used to prevent the name from being uttered.

About pronunciation, Joel M. Hoffman, for example13, argues that the Tetragram was never pronounced. The other Hebrews lean on, among other things, on the theophores names and chapters of the Pentateeuque containing the Tetragram and on a passage commonly called “Isaiah’s Dream” whose prosody and assonances in “O” and “OR” suggest a pronunciation of a nearby phonologically neighbouring surrogate name, used at the time of the drafting of the text, before the prohibition14 composed with the Tetragram generally considered one of the oldest in the biblical corpus, written around the 8th century BC15.

The ban goes so far that it changes the Hebrew number. This one is decimal type; the letter yud representsthe number 10. From 11 to 19 included, the numbers are written on the “10-n” model: 11 – 10 – 1, 12 – 10 – 2, and so on. However, following this pattern, the numbers 15 and 16 would be formed by two of the letters of the Tetragram: yod ()and he ()for 15 (10-5), and yod ()and waw ()for 16 (10-6). The number is therefore modified: the letter thet, which is not part of the Tetragram and has the value 9, is substituted for the yod (10). The number 15 is written (9-6) ,and 16 is written (9-7) טז. This is why the numbering is used with thet by designating by Tou Bichvat and Tou Beav the feasts of 15 Chevat and 15 Av.

Pronunciations in Christianity[modifying | [ change the code]

The Tetragram in a Sacristy, in Sweden,with the vowels of “Jehovah”..

Ancient church[ | change the code]

The prohibition uttering the proper name of God concerns not only the Jews but also the early Christians, who may never have known his pronunciation. In the Christian liturgy and in the late copies of the Seventy and then in the Vulgate,the Tetragram is replaced by the words Kurios (K- in Greek), and Dominus (in Latin) “Lord”. However, in his Prologus Galeatus, a preface to the books of Samuel and the Kings, Jerome of Stridon says he has encountered the Name in archaic characters in Greek scrolls. Jerome also evokes ignorant Greeks who set out to transcribe the divine name16.

Middle Ages and Renaissance[modifying | [ change the code]

The transliteration into “Jehovah” dates from the end of the 13th century: it is due to the Catalan contestor Raimond Martin, in his book Pugio Fidei 17, “some Christians who read the Bible in its original version read YHWH by applying the vocalization of the term Adonai, that is, by interscaling its three vowels “O””18, ‘O’ and ‘O’, and thus obtained the name Jehovah »19. This hypothesis resurfaced in Renaissanceesotericism, when Johannes Reuchlin put forward a theory on the relationship between the Tetragram and the name of Jesus. In his De verbo mirifico, he states that the name of Jesus, transcribed to Hebrew, gives the pentagram YHSVH or IHSUH, the four letters of the Tetragram YHVH or IHUH, at the heart of which he inserted a fifth, the Sh: ‘shin ‘. According to this hypothesis, this additional consonant would make the name pronounceable. This would then read Yehoshuah, that is to say Jesus20. This theory is not accepted by specialists in the Hebrew language. Martin Luther,himself a translator of the Bible, had already disqualified her by explaining that the alleged similarity between Jehovah and Jehoshuah would have required not only the addition of a consonant (the shin)to Jehovah but also the removal of another (the Jehoshuah ayin)21).

The Tetragram in the Royal Chapel [archive] of the Palace of Versailles is present at two places of the altar in equilateral triangles: on the door of the tabernacle and above.

Contemporary era[modifying | [ change the code]

The word “Jehovah,” of scientific appearance, is historically and theologically questionable. For André-Marie Gerard22, this version “does not belong to any language… if not that of Racine and Victor Hugo! Long forgotten, the transcription “Jehovah” was abandoned at the beginning of the 19th century by specialists after the work of the German linguist Wilhelm Gesenius, who replaced it with the transcription “Yahweh”. However, this hypothesis remained popular in french literature during the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century,the philologist Paul Joon refers to the 1894 edition of the translation Crampon, which uses the word “Jehovah”. He in turn adopts this solution and prefers this “literary and usual form in French” to the “hypothetical” Yahweh form23.

Catholicposition[modifying | [ change the code]

However, following Gesenius, Catholicism preferred to use the transcription Yahweh (or “Yahweh” by francization) throughout the twentieth century. This form has been applied in non-liturgical editions of the Bible as the Jerusalem Bible. The philologist André Lemaire noted in 2001: “We are generally hesitating today between two vocalizations: Yahwoh and Yahweh. With most translations, we will adopt here the conventional vocalization Yahweh”4.

However, at the end of the 20th century, theCatholic Church became more reticent about this formulation. In 2001, “by directive of the Holy Father,” the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments declared: “By conforming to an immemorial tradition, already evident in the Seventy,the name of Almighty God, expressed in Hebrew in the Tetragram, and translated into Latin by the word Dominus 24, must be rendered in each vernacular by a word of the same meaning”25. This directive was recalled on 29 June 2008 by a letter to the episcopal conferences and put into practice in October 2008 by the Synod of Bishops on the word of God in the life and mission of the Church. The Tetragram is therefore translated as “the Lord.”

Protestant translations of the Bible[ | change the code]

Most French-speaking Protestant Bibles render the Tetragram by “The Lord,” following Pierre Robert Olivétan (1509-1538), cousin of John Calvin, who was the first to translate the Bible into French from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts. Olivetan’s reasoning was to attach the tetragram to the root of the verb “being”(Hebrew HWH, now HYH), a verb that is used to present God in many passages of the Bible, the best known of which is the account of God’s revelation to Moses near the burning bush and his “I am the one who am”3. This “Olivetan find,” as some commentators have dubbed it, is a dynamic translation that reflects the profound meaning of a Hebrew term that severaltexts from the Old and New Testament interpret in convergent ways.26. The Bible of Olivétan,known as the “Olivétan-Synodale version,” remained the reference text in French Protestantism until the publication of David Martin’s Bibles (1707)27, Jean Ostervald (1744)28, and Louis Segond (1880 and 1910)29 all of which take up the “Olivétan find”3.

Ecumenical translations of the Bible[ | change the code]

In the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible (TOB), which combines the efforts of specialists mainly Catholic and Protestant, but also Orthodox (especially for the Old Testament), the Tetragram is translated as “the SEIGNOR” into capital letters.

The verb “to be”[ | change the code]

Detailed Articles: Burning Drink (Bible) and in: I Am that I Am.

The Revelation of the Burning Drink[ | change the code]

The Tetragram on one of Lakish’s ostraca.

The explanation of the Tetragram is provided by the Bible in Ex 3:13-14 during the episode of the Burning Drink,when Moses asks God to name himself. The answer is given in two stages. First, God replies: “Eyeh Asher Eyeh,” a theological pun for which there are several translations but which twice contains the verb “being.” Then, at Moses’ insistence, God himself pronounces the Tetragram: “YHWH,” which comes from the same verb “being”30.

The biblical account is translated in these terms by the Jerusalem Bible :

[13] “Moses said to God, “Behold, I will find the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers sent me to you.” But if they say to me, “What’s his name?” [14] God said to Moses,“I am the one who is [Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה]”. And he said, “Here is what you will say to the Israelites: I am sent to you.” »

It is in the next verse(Ex 3:15) that God pronounces the Tetragram before Moses31.

According to Jewish tradition, it is rather a refusal of revelation, in an apophaticconception. This biblical passage prepares the taboo of the name while “speculating” on it30.

Philosophical approach[modifying | [ change the code]

The expression Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh can be rendered in French by I am the one who is,or by I am the one who am (in the translation due to Louis Segond, which also translates by the Lord3) or by I am who I will be in the TOB32. The Rabbinate Bible translated as Being Invariable33, which Henri Meschonnic regrets34, which detects contamination of the Greek “Theos” of the Seventy.

The repetitive use of the verb “being” in this formula and its reappearance in the Tetragram, as well as the diversity of translations that result from it, do not go without “loving” the philosophy itself according to Xavier Tilliette35. The Eyeh Asher Eyeh can be seen as “the amazing statement from which the Name par excellence, the Unpronounceable Name” derives.35. It is here, in the revelation on Mount Horeb,that the God ofAbraham joins the God of philosophers.

The question of Ex 3:14 arises from medieval Christianity to the “metaphysics of Exodus” studied by Stephen Gilson and the divine “sovereign freedom” defined by Luigi Pareyson.

Thomism perceives in the Eyeh Asher Eyeh an expression of the “act of being” and translated as I am the One who is,which tilts the formulatowards ontology35. Stephen Gilson,making his own this translation, writes: “There is only one God, and this God is the Being, this is the cornerstone of all Christian philosophy, and it is not Plato, not even Aristotle, but Moses who has laid it”36. On the other hand, Ernst Bloch, in favour of the translation I am The One who will be,proposes the “utopian” vision of a kind of “God-Exodus” constantly, in perpetual becoming, “coextensive to humanity”35.

Traditions and works related to the Tetragram[modifying | [ change the code]

According to the gematria,the value of the Tetragram is 26:10 (yōḏ) – 5 (h) – 6 (ww) – 5 (h) – 26.

The assumption of an exact pronunciation of the Tetragram and its power effects, or even its “magic” effects, has greatly fuelled literary production. The myth of the Golem created by the Maharal of Prague is one of the many variants, popularized in the modern era by the novel by Gustav Meyrink, The Golem .

The Adversary,Ellery Queen’scrime novel, offers the “reading” of four crimes on the model of the “reading” of the Tetragram. In a similar register, “Death and the Compass”, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in the collection Fictions, depicts a series of murders conceived according to the Tetragram and punctuated by “The first letter of the Name was articulated”, “The second letter of the Name was articulated” … Each of the letters of the Tetragram is likened to one of the four cardinal points. The Aleph, by the same author, indirectly takes up the themes of the “power” of the divine name.

Yah Mo B There (en) est une chanson R&B de James Ingram et Michael McDonald. Elle a été écrite par Ingram, McDonald, Rod Temperton et produit par Quincy Jones. Selon Michael McDonald, le titre original était Yahweh be there.

Notes et références[modifier | modifier le code]

  1. ↑ (en) Shmuel Bolozky, 501 Hebrew Verbs Fully Conjugated, p. 149.
  2. ↑ Directive de Benoît XVI [archive] répercutée dans une disposition de la Congrégation pour le culte divin.
  3. ↑ a b c et d “Désirant montrer la vraie propriété et signification de ce mot YHWH (…) je l’ai exprimé selon son origine, au plus près qu’il m’a été possible par le mot Éternel. Car YHVH vient de HWH qui veut dire «est». Or, il n’y a que lui qui soit vraiment et qui fasse être toute chose (…) De le nommer comme les Juifs Adonaï c’est-à-dire Seigneur, ce n’est pas remplir et satisfaire à la signification et majesté du mot. Car Adonaï en l’Écriture est communicable, étant aux hommes comme à Dieu. Mais Yahvé est incommunicable, ne se pouvant approprier et attribuer, sinon qu’à Dieu seul selon son essence.” Extrait de la préface de la Bible d’Olivétan, cité par « Le tétragramme YHWH et sa traduction par “Éternel” » [archive], sur https://www.bible-ouverte.ch/ [archive] (consulté le 19 avril 2020).
  4. ↑ a et b André Lemaire, « Le yahwisme ancien », 2001 [archive].
  5. ↑ André Lemaire, Naissance du monothéisme : point de vue d’un historien, Bayard, 2003, p. 27.
  6. ↑ Soit 153 occurrences dans le Livre de la Genèse, 364 dans le Livre de l’Exode, 285 dans le Lévitique, 387 dans le Livre des Nombres, 330 dans le Deutéronome.
  7. ↑ (en) Article « Tetragrammaton » [archive] in Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906.
  8. ↑ (en) Douglas Knight, The Meaning of the Bible : The Names of God, New York, HarperOne, 2011.
  9. ↑ Lazare Wogue, Le Pentateuque, Paris, 1860, t. 1, p. L.
  10. ↑ Elohim est le pluriel de révérence de el, nom commun désignant la divinité (« dieu » avec une minuscule).
  11. ↑ En termes techniques, cette substitution se nomme le « qéré permanent ». Un qeré (de la racine du verbe « lire ») est le mot ou le lemme tel qu’il doit être lu, par opposition au ketiv (du verbe « écrire »), qui est la formulation écrite.
  12. ↑ Weingreen, Jacob., Jean Margain, Haelewyck, Jean-Claude. et Sessions de langues bibliques (Montpellier), Hébreu biblique, méthode élémentaire, Beauchesne, 2004 (ISBN 2701014530 et 9782701014531, OCLC 470499882, lire en ligne [archive])
  13. ↑ Dans In the Beginning.
  14. ↑ Cours de Michaël Langlois sur la prononciation des voyelles en hébreu biblique dans le cadre du DU de langues bibliques, Université de Strasbourg.
  15. ↑ Thomas Römer et al., Introduction à l’Ancien Testament, Labor et Fides.
  16. Epistle 25, quoted in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), article “Jehovah.” In the same article, the encyclopedia gives some examples of transcriptions, whether Greek or not: Diodorus of Sicily (Jao), Irenaeus of Lyon (Jaoth), followers of Valentin (Jao), Clement of Alexandria (Jaou), Origen (Jao), the Samaritans (Jabe), James of Edessa (Jehjeh)…
  17. And quod is nomen tuum? YHWH (in Hebrew characters) Jehova, sive Adonay, quia Dominus es omnium incunable de Pugio Fidei, III.2.3., commentary of the Book of Kings, written around 1270.
  18. The ‘aef pata’ ‘O’ vocalizing the aleph of ‘duna’ is rendered by a shewa ‘O’ when he vocalizes the yod of YHWH.
  19. ↑ Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Judaism,Cerf-Laffont, et al. “Books,” 1996, article “God, Names of. According to Robert Henry James, “the bad pronunciation ‘Jehovah’ was introduced by a xviAnd siècle, Petrus Galatinus, dans son livre De arcanis catholicae veritatis, 1518 » (The Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, 1899, p. 4).
  20. – Cf. Johannes Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico (From the admirable verb) (1494), in Sumtliche Werke, t. 1, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996, XV-445 p., in François Secret, The Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance, Dunod, Paris, 1964, re-ed. Arma Artis, 1985, 44-51.
  21. Martin Luther, Studies on Psalms, ed. Georges Laguarrigue, Labor and Fides,2001, p. 156 sq.
  22. – Bible Dictionary, Robert Laffont, coll. “Books,” 1989, article “Names of God.”
  23. Paul Joon , Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, 1923, note p. 49.
  24. The Congregation refers here to the Vulgate,where St Jerome translates the Tetragram into the Latin word Dominus,“the Lord.”
  25. Congregation for divine worship and the discipline of the sacraments – From the use of vernacular languages in the edition of the books of the Roman liturgy (Rome 2001) [archive], Fifth instruction “for the correct application of the Constitution on the holy liturgy” (2001) on the Vatican website.
  26. See in particular Ex 3,14-15, Ex 6.3, Ex 34.6, Jn 6.35, etc. Jn 6.48, Jn 6.51, Jn 8.12, Jn 9.5, Jn 10.9-14,etc., quoted by “The tetragram YHWH and its translation by “Eternal” [archive], on https://www.bible-ouverte.ch/ [archive] (consulted April 19, 2020).
  27. “The David Martin Bible” [archive], on https://www.bibliorama.org/ [archive] (accessed April 19, 2020).
  28. “The Ostervald Bible” [archive], on https://www.bibliorama.org/ [archive] (consulted April 19, 2020).
  29. “The Segond Bible 1880″ [archive], on https://www.bibliorama.org/ [archive] (accessed April 19, 2020).
  30. To and b Thomas Ramer, From the divine name to the attack of Moses. Preparations for the Wound Narrative [archive], Chair of biblical circles of the College of France,March 27, 2014, 17:30.
  31. Ex 3.15 in the Segond Bible, Exodus 3:15 [archive] in the Rabbinate Bible.
  32. Ecumenical translation of the Bible [archive] “Archived copy” (version of November 11, 2008 on theInternet Archive),with all the introductions and notes, site of the deer’s ed.
  33. Rabbinate Bible [archive].
  34. Henri Meschonnic, Glories, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 2001.
  35. A b c and d Xavier Tilliette, Philosophers Read the Bible, Deer, 2001, chapter 3, “The Burning Drink,” p. 77 sq.
  36. Philosophical Comments of the Being, Vrin, 1983, p. 236 and 241. Quoted by Xavier Tilliette, Philosophers Read the Bible, Op. cit., p. 80.

Appendixes[ | change the code]

On other Wikimedia projects:

  • YHWH, sur Wikimedia Commons
  • YHWH, on the Wiktionary

Bibliography[ | change the code]

Ancient texts[ | change the code]

  • Baruch Spinoza, Hebrew Hebrew Grammar, VrinPhilosophical Bookstore, Paris, 2006 (translated from Latin) Document utilisé pour la rédaction de l’article
  • Lazare Wogue, Le Pentateeuque, Paris, 1860 Document utilisé pour la rédaction de l’article

Recent sources[ | change the code]

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External links[ | change the code]

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