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Yahweh ( /ˈjɑːweɪ/ or /ˈjɑːhweɪ/; Hebrew: יהוה) is the name of God in the Bible.[1]
The word Yahweh is a modern scholarly convention for the Hebrew יהוה, transcribed into Roman letters as YHWH and known as the Tetragrammaton, for which the original pronunciation is unknown. The most likely meaning of the name may be “He Brings Into Existence Whatever Exists", but there are many theories and none is regarded as conclusive. The traditional rendering of the name, as found in English Bibles, is "I am who I am" or "I am that I am".[2][3]
The Bible describes Yahweh as the god who delivered Israel from Egypt and gave the Ten Commandments[4] and says that Yahweh revealed himself to Israel as a god who would not permit his people to make idols or worship other gods[5] "I am Yahweh, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, or My praise to idols."[6]
The history of the emergence of Israelite monotheism and Yahweh worship has been the subject of scholarly study since at least the 19th century and Julius Wellhausen'’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel; in the 20th century a formative work was William F. Albright's Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan – An Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (1968),[7] which insisted on the essential otherness of Yahweh from the Canaanite gods from the very beginning of Israel's history. However, scholars of the Ancient Near East have since seen Yahweh worship as emerging from a West Semitic and Canaanite background.[8][9] Theophoric names, names of local gods similar to Yahweh, and archaeological evidence are used along with the Biblical source texts to describe pre-Israel origins of Yahweh worship, the relationship of Yahweh with local gods, and the manner in which Yahweh worship evolved into Jewish monotheism.
Worship of Yahweh alone is a central idea of historical Judaism.[10] Much of Christianity views Jesus as the human incarnation of Yahweh.[11] The importance of the divine name and the character of the “one true god” revealed as Yahweh are often contrasted with the significantly different character of rival deities known by different names in the traditional polytheistic religions.[12] Some scholars, including William G. Dever, have asserted that the Asherah was worshipped as a consort of Yahweh, until the 6th century BCE, when strict monolatry of Yahweh became prevalent in the wake of the destruction of the temple.[13][14] However, the consort hypothesis has been subject to debate with numerous scholars publishing disagreement.[15]
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The archaeological evidence suggests that the greater part of the population of Israel was of Canaanite origin; given this, one would expect the Israelites to worship a Canaanite god, but in the West Semitic world Yahweh was not worshiped outside Israel.[16] (West Semitic is the family of languages to which Hebrew belongs, along with Phoenician, Edomite, Moabite and a few others; they were similar enough to be mutually intelligible).[17]
Biblical Hebrew was written with consonants only, meaning that the name of God is written YHWH. The original pronunciation of this word was lost many centuries ago, but in the 19th century the eminent Hebrew scholar Wilhelm Gesenius (1786–1842) suggested "Yahweh" as the most probable vocalization, based on his study of early Greek transcriptions, theophoric names, and the reported pronunciation of the name in the Samaritan tradition.[18] This has become the conventional usage in Biblical scholarship.[3]
Most scholars accept that YHWH is made up of Y, meaning "he", plus a form of HWY, the root of a group of words connected with "being" and "becoming".[19] Frank Moore Cross has advanced the hypothesis that the name Yahweh is an abbreviation, in which the theophoric element el has been dropped, thus giving yhwh-'l or "El-Yahweh",[20] which would parallel "El-Shaddai" and "El-Elyon". El was the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and El-YHWH is still attested as an epithet, 'El, who shows himself' in a few places in the Old Testament (in Psalm 50:1, for example). It would have originated as a description of El's appearance and blessing: "El who shows himself".[21] The author of Exodus 3:13–15 gives a similar explanation: God, asked by Moses for his name, provides three names: "I Am That I Am", followed by "I Am", and finally "YHWH":
As the origins of Yahweh seem to lie to the southeast of Israel, in Edom and Midian or even further south, an alternative explanation looks for its etymology in South Semitic languages like Arabic rather than in Hebrew, which is West Semitic. One of the meanings of HWY in Arabic is connected with falling or causing to fall, leading to an interpretation of Yahweh as a storm god whose name means "He who causes to fall" (meaning rain, lightning, and his enemies) or "He storms". This also helps explain Yahweh's attributes as a storm god (he comes to rescue Israel surrounded by darkness and thick clouds, and the earth trembles, the clouds drop water, and the mountains quake at his appearance), and the way he appropriates attributes from the rival storm god Baal.[22]
Divine names, however, are often much older than the religions using them, and ideas about gods change over time; despite Exodus 14 it is fairly improbable that the authors of the Bible were aware of the meaning of the name Yahweh, and even an accurate knowledge of the origins of the name will not help understand the significance Yahweh held for them.[23]
The overwhelming majority of our knowledge of the god Yahweh comes from the Hebrew Bible (more or less identical with the Christian Old Testament). This consists of 24 books ranging in subject matter from history to poetry to philosophical meditation, and in time from perhaps the 10th century to the 2nd century BCE. Almost every book of the Bible mentions Yahweh. Other names for God are also used, notably Elohim, but in every case these are simply alternatives for Yahweh.
"Israel" is a term with many meanings, but in this section it means the ethnic group who emerged in the Palestinian hill country in the Iron Age I period (1200-1000 BCE). The Bible tells a story in which Israel escaped from Egypt, met Yahweh on a mountain-top in the wilderness, agreed to become his chosen people, and conquered Canaan with his help. The view of modern scholarship is quite different: the archaeological evidence points to an Israelite community arising peacefully and internally in the highlands of Canaan.[24]
If Yahweh was not a Canaanite god, this raises the question of where he originated and how he became the national god of Israel and Judah in Iron Age II (1000-586). The first probable record of his name is in two Egyptian inscriptions from the 14th and 13th centuries, as a place-name in the region of Edom associated with Shoshu-Bedouins". According to a widely accepted theory (the "Kenite hypothesis"), this god could have been brought north to the Palestinian hill country and the early Israelites by migratory Edomite desert tribes, of whom the Kenites were one.[25]
According to a theory advanced by Karel van der Toorn, the creation of a unified kingdom early in Iron Age II was the crucial act that led to Yahweh becoming the god of Israel. In Iron Age I the religious life of ordinary Israelites, like that of other peoples throughout the Ancient Near East, was organised around the family-based cult of the ancestors and devotion to a local god, the "god of the fathers".[26] According to the Bible the first king, Saul, was a Gibeonite, a tribe with its roots in Edom, and in order to unify the new kingdom and cement his own authority Saul promoted his own god, Yahweh, as god of the kingdom;[27] previously, each extended family or clan was the "people" of a particular god, but now the entire Israelite community became the "people of Yahweh".[28]
Yahweh was the state god of the northern kingdom of Israel by at least the early 9th century, and this is confirmed by an inscription from Kuntillet Ajrud which refers to Yahweh of Samaria, probably meaning the kingdom rather than the city.[29]
More than forty inscriptions mentioning Yahweh, Yahu or Yah have been discovered, all tending to reinforce the centrality of Yahweh to Israelite religion. The inscriptions include blessings, oaths, salutations, votive offerings, seals and prayers. No other gods or goddesses are unambiguously recorded except for contentious references to Asherah, who might be a goddess and Yahweh's consort, or possibly some kind of cult object. A fragment from Kuntillet Ajrud (9th/8th centuries) mentions Baal in association with Yahweh, but in this case the word might simply mean "Lord" (the literal meaning of "baal").[30]
A 10th century cult stand from Taanach (a town in Northern Israel, near Megiddo) shows, among other images, two winged sphinxes with an empty space between them, possibly meant to represent Yahweh between the cherubim. A horse or bull figure on the same stand, topped by a solar disk, may represent either Yahweh or Baal, and a stylised tree and female figures are testimony to the presence of goddesses (possibly Asherah) in the pantheon.[31]
Archaeologists and historical scholars use a variety of ways to organize and interpret the available iconographic and textual information. William G. Dever contrasts "official religion/state religion/book religion" of the elite with “folk religion” of the masses.[32] Rainer Albertz contrasts "official religion" with "family religion", "personal piety", and "internal religious pluralism".[33] Jacques Berlinerblau analyzes the evidence in terms of "official religion" and "popular religion" in ancient Israel.[34]
Tension between monotheism and polytheism among the Israelites is documented as early as the account of Exodus. Aaron's statement "These are your gods", in the plural, when only one golden calf was molded, looks forward to the two golden calves of Jereboam.[35]
Both the archaeological evidence and the Biblical texts document tensions between groups comfortable with the worship of Yahweh alongside local deities such as Asherah and Baal and those insistent on worship of Yahweh alone during the monarchal period (1 Kings 18, Jeremiah 2)[36] The Deuteronomistic source gives evidence of a strong monotheistic party during the reign of king Josiah during the late 7th century BCE, but the strength and prevalence of earlier monotheistic worship of Yahweh is widely debated based on interpretations of how much of the Deuteronomistic history is accurately based on earlier sources, and how much has been re-worked by Deuteronomistic redactors to bolster their theological views.[37] The archaeological record documents widespread polytheism in and around Israel during the period of the monarchy.[36]
Patrick D. Miller has distinguished three broad categories of Yahwism, orthodox, heterodox, and syncretistic.[38] Orthodox Yahwism demanded the exclusive worship of Yahweh (although without denying the existence of other gods). The powers of blessing (health, wealth, continuity, fertility) and salvation (forgiveness, victory, deliverance from oppression and threat) resided fully in Yahweh, and his will was communicated via oracle and prophetic vision or audition. Divination, soothsaying, and necromancy were prohibited. The individual or community could cry out to Yahweh and would receive a divine response, mediated by priestly or prophetic figures.[39]
Sanctuaries were erected in various places and were used to express devotion to Yahweh by means of sacrifice, festival meals and celebrations, prayer, and praise. Toward the end of the seventh century (BCE) in Judah, worship of Yahweh was restricted to the temple in Jerusalem, while the major sanctuaries in the northern kingdom were at Bethel (near the southern border) and Dan (in the north). Certain times were set for the gathering of the people to celebrate the gifts of Yahweh and the deity’s acts of deliverance and redemption.[40]
Everything in the moral realm was understood as a part of relation to Yahweh as a manifestation of holiness. Family relationships and the welfare of the weaker members of society were protected by divine law, and purity of conduct, dress, food, etc. were regulated. Religious leadership resided in priests who were associated with sanctuaries, and also in prophets, who were bearers of divine oracles. In the political sphere the king was understood as the appointee and agent of Yahweh.[41]
Heterodox Yahwism is described by Miller as a mixture of elements of orthodox Yahwism with particular practices that conflicted with orthodox Yahwism or were not customarily a part of it. For example, heterodox Yahwism included the presence of cult objects rejected in by orthodox expressions, such as the Asherah, figurines of various sorts (females, horses and riders, animals and birds, and the calves or bulls of the Northern Kingdom. The "high places" as centers of worship seems to have moved from an acceptable place within Yahwism to an increasingly condemned status in official and orthodox circles. Efforts to know the future or the will of the deity could also be understood as heterodox if they went outside the boundaries of orthodox Yahwism, and even commonly accepted revelatory mechanism such as dreams could be condemned if the resulting message was perceived as false. Consulting mediums, wizards, and diviners was often employed by heterodox Yahwists.[42]
Syncretism covers the worship of Baal, the heavenly bodies (sun, moon, and stars), the "Queen of Heaven" and other deities as well as practices such as child sacrifice: "Other gods were invoked and serviced in time of need or blessing and provision for life when the worship of Yahweh seemed inadequate for those purposes."[43]
It has traditionally been believed that monotheism was part of Israel's original covenant with Yahweh on Mount Sinai, and the idolatry criticized by the prophets was due to Israel's backsliding.[44] But during the 20th century it became increasingly recognised that the Bible's presentation raises a number of questions: Why do the Ten Commandments declare that there should be no other gods "before Me" (Yahweh), if there are no other gods at all? Why do the Israelites sing at the crossing of the Red Sea that "there is no god like you, O Yahweh",[Ex 15:11] implying that other gods exist? These observations eventually overthrew the belief that Israel had always worshipped no other god but Yahweh.[45]
Evidence of Israelite worship of Canaanite gods appears both in the Bible and the archaeological record. Respectful references to the goddess Asherah or her symbol, for example, as part of the worship of Yahweh, are found in the eighth century inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, and references to the Canaanite gods Resheph and Deber appear without criticism in the original Jewish text of Habakkuk 3:5. While traditionally these words have been understood to be either Jewish words whose meaning has been derived from characteristics of these Canaanite deities[46] or references to demons,[47] some interpret these as evidence of Israelite recognition of these gods as part of the military retinue of Yahweh.[48] The "host of heaven" is also mentioned without criticism in 1_Kings 22:19 and Zephaniah 1:5. Though the "host of heaven" has traditionally been interpreted as either the stars/heavenly bodies or the host of angels/heavenly spirits depending on the context,[49] some again have interpreted this term to refer to a pantheon of Israelite gods.[50] The god El is also continually identified with Yahweh.[51]
Israel inherited polytheism from late first-millennium Canaan, and Canaanite religion in turn had its roots in the religion of second-millennium Ugarit.[52] In the 2nd millennium, polytheism was expressed through the concepts of the divine council and the divine family, a single entity with four levels: the chief god and his wife (El and Asherah); the seventy divine children or "stars of El" (including Baal, Astarte, Anat, probably Resheph, as well as the sun-goddess Shapshu and the moon-god Yerak); the head helper of the divine household, Kothar wa-Hasis; and the servants of the divine household, including the messenger-gods who would later appear as the "angels" of the Hebrew Bible.[53]
In the earliest stage Yahweh was one of the seventy children of El, each of whom was the patron deity of one of the seventy nations. This is illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint texts of Deuteronomy 32:8–9, in which El, as the head of the divine assembly, gives each member of the divine family a nation of his own, "according to the number of the divine sons": Israel is the portion of Yahweh.[54] The later Masoretic text, evidently uncomfortable with the polytheism expressed by the phrase, altered it to "according to the number of the children of Israel"[55]
Between the eighth to the sixth centuries El became identified with Yahweh, Yahweh-El became the husband of the goddess Asherah, and the other gods and the divine messengers gradually became mere expressions of Yahweh's power.[56] Yahweh is cast in the role of the Divine King ruling over all the other deities, as in Psalm 29:2, where the "sons of God" are called upon to worship Yahweh; and as Ezekiel 8-10 suggests, the Temple itself became Yahweh's palace, populated by those in his retinue.[52]
It is in this period that the earliest clear monotheistic statements appear in the Bible, for example in the apparently seventh-century Deuteronomy 4:35, 39, 1 Samuel 2:2, 2 Samuel 7:22, 2 Kings 19:15, 19 (= Isaiah 37:16, 20), and Jeremiah 16:19, 20 and the sixth-century portion of Isaiah 43:10–11, 44:6, 8, 45:5–7, 14, 18, 21, and 46:9.[57] Because many of the passages involved appear in works associated with either Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through Kings) or in Jeremiah, most recent scholarly treatments have suggested that a Deuteronomistic movement of this period developed the idea of monotheism as a response to the religious issues of the time.[58]
The first factor behind this development involves changes in Israel's social structure. At Ugarit, social identity was strongest at the level of the family: legal documents, for example, were often made between the sons of one family and the sons of another. Ugarit's religion, with its divine family headed by El and Asherah, mirrored this human reality.[59] The same was true in ancient Israel through most of the monarchy – for example, the story of Achan in Joshua 8 suggests an extended family as the major social unit. However, the family lineages went through traumatic changes beginning in the eighth century due to major social stratification, followed by Assyrian incursions. In the seventh and sixth centuries, we begin to see expressions of individual identity (Deuteronomy 26:16; Jeremiah 31:29–30; Ezekiel 18). A culture with a diminished lineage system, deteriorating over a long period from the ninth or eighth century onward, less embedded in traditional family patrimonies, might be more predisposed both to hold the individual accountable for his behavior, and to see an individual deity accountable for the cosmos. In short, the rise of the individual as the basic social unit led to the rise of a single god replacing a divine family.[60]
The second major factor was the rise of the neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian empires. As long as Israel was, from its own perspective, part of a community of similar small nations, it made sense to see the Israelite pantheon on par with the other nations, each one with its own patron god – the picture described with Deuteronomy 32:8–9. The assumption behind this worldview was that each nation was as powerful as its patron god.[61] However, the neo-Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in ca. 722 challenged this, for if the neo-Assyrian empire were so powerful, so must be its god; and conversely, if Israel could be conquered (and later Judah, c. 586), it implied that Yahweh in turn was a minor divinity. The crisis was met by separating the heavenly power and earthly kingdoms. Even though Assyria and Babylon were so powerful, the new monotheistic thinking in Israel reasoned, this did not mean that the god of Israel and Judah was weak. Assyria had not succeeded because of the power of its god Marduk; it was Yahweh who was using Assyria to punish and purify the one nation which Yahweh had chosen.[58]
By the post-Exilic period, full monotheism had emerged: Yahweh was the sole God, not just of Israel, but of the whole world. If the nations were tools of Yahweh, then the new king who would come to redeem Israel might not be a Judean as taught in older literature (e.g. Psalm 2). Now, even a foreigner such as Cyrus the Persian could serve as the Lord's anointed (Isaiah 44:28, 45:1). One god stood behind all the world's history.[58]
In modern Judaism, the Tetragrammaton is conventionally substituted by Adonai ("my Lord") when reading the text of the Bible. Jews ceased to pronounce the name in the intertestamental period, replacing it with the common noun Elohim, “the God”, to demonstrate the universal sovereignty of Israel's deity over all others. At the same time, the divine name was increasingly regarded as too sacred to be uttered, and was replaced in spoken ritual by the word Adonai (“My Lord”), or with haShem (“the Name”) in everyday speech,[62] see Names of God in Judaism for details.
Traditionally in both Latin and vernacular worship "Lord" was used, following the Greek New Testament and Septuagint. Although the rendering of the Tetragrammaton as "Yahweh" is found in the Old Testament of versions such as the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible, and New Jerusalem Bible (1985), the liturgical use of Yahweh in English-speaking worship was reprobated by the Vatican in 2008.[63] The Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments direction that the word "Lord" be used instead of Yahweh in English-language worship, was based on the understanding that Jews at the time of Christ and also early Christians substituted other words rather than pronounce the name.[64]
Bible scholar and author Charles Ryrie, author of the Ryrie Study Bible,[65] says the name “Yahweh” appears 6,823 times in the Old Testament, and also many times in the New Testament when it directly quotes or paraphrases passages from the Old Testament containing God’s name. He writes that the name "Yahweh" is particularly associated with God's holiness,[Lev 11:44,45] his hatred of sin [Gen 6:3–7] and his provision of redemption.[Isa 53:1,5,6,10] It may be that the contemporary translations of the Bible do not use "Yahweh" out of respect for the traditional Jewish reverence for this name.[66]
The King James Bible, the New American Standard Bible, and the New International Version substitute the titles “LORD” and “GOD” with all the letters capitalized where the Name “Yahweh” actually belongs. The name "Yahweh" does not appear in the text of most popular English Bible translations on the market today. Jewish Bible scholars introduced this tradition in the mid-2nd century B.C., and it has continued since that time. In 1611, the inaugural edition of the King James Bible editors did not include the name ”Yahweh,” not being aware of the rendering, though Jehovah does appear several times.
There are some contemporary instances where the spelling Yahweh has come into religious use. The Sacred Name Movement is a small Christian movement, active since the 1930s, which propagates the use of the name Yahweh in Bible translations and in liturgy. "Sacred Name Bibles" are Bibles which render the Tetragrammaton by transliteration (or iconographically by inserting Hebrew script in the translation). An early such Bible was Rotherham's Emphasized Bible of 1902.
| Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Jehovah. |
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Jewish Encyclopedia. 1901–1906.