Jehovah

Jehovah is a name used in many translations of the Bible, principally in the Old Testament. It represents a misunderstanding of the name of the one God used by the southern Israelite tribes.

"It is now held that the original name was IaHUe(H), i.e. Jahve(h, or with the English values of the letters, Yahwe(h" (OED). This was written in Hebrew (which traditionally does not write vowels) as the four consonants YHWH. (This is known as the sacred tetragrammaton.) By about the third century BCE, the attitude had arisen among the Jews that this name was taboo, or too sacred to be pronounced; in speech, God was labelled 'the Lord', or, in Hebrew, 'Adonai'. The written texts from here on wrote the tetragrammaton, but added later indications of the vowels of adonai to remind those that read them aloud to pronounce 'the Lord' where the writers originally put 'Yahweh'.

In the sixteenth century, with the revival of learning stimulated by the dispersal of manuscripts from the libraries of Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the consequent resurgence of interest in the biblical languages, translators misconstrued this usage, and wrote the consonants of the tetragrammaton with the vowels of adonay, giving IeHoVa(H)) in Latin, or Iehoua(h) in translation into the common European languages. The two forms most current in English are Jehovah and Yahweh (a transliteration of the same error into languages such as German with different representations of sounds). Many English translations give this combination as 'The LORD GOD', or simply 'The Lord'.

OED cites as the first use of the form Jehovah: Galatinus, P. (1518) De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis ii. f. xlviij.

The usual name of 'God' among the northern Israelites was Elohim. This is derived from a more fundamental word in Hebrew (and found in other Semitic languages) El.

Etymological note: Oddly enough in a monotheistic religion, Elohim is plural in form, though always construed and translated as singular. Adonai is also plural, derived by J. A. Emerton (2001) ('Names of God in the Hebrew Bible' in Metzger and Coogan 2001): "The Hebrew word is a plural of majesty (with a singular meaning) of ādōn, which is translated 'Lord'", or, literally, '[my] lords'. Hence the "LORD GOD" mentioned above.