What Is The Tetragrammaton?

Exodus 3 and the Personal Name of God

Exodus three is what we're going to be looking at. And we're going to be the main focus of Exodus three is the personal name of God, which we say the Lord, but it's also rendered as Jehovah or more commonly these days, Yahweh.

And the technical term for it is the, as you can see, how do you pronounce this? Who wants to give a, Hey, all right. Tetra grammaton. How many of you have played Tetris? Oh, I'm surprised. It's that many Tetris, all the blocks.

There's how many blocks for, right? So Tetra means four grammaton. That's basically it means letters. So the four letters and what are the four letters? We're doing it in English markets. We're not going that deep tonight.

Y H W H. And in Exodus three, this is the name that God gives. I am who I am, right? So I am is the Tetra grammaton, the four letters Y H W H, but the Jews just rendered this Lord. They didn't want to use God's name.

They were afraid to use it in vain. So they just swapped it out with Lord. And in our English translations, it's capital L capital O capital R capital D. So how many of you, this is familiar to you? At least that part is okay.

Just about everybody. So Lord in all capitals is this name. I am Y H W H, which is either Jehovah. Most scholars think that that's incorrect, but that's what they used to think. Now they think it's Yahweh.

And of course you can sort of see how it would sound that way, but they had to add vowels because you can't pronounce this with all consonants. So what they did is they basically took the vowels from the other use of Lord with lowercase O R D, which is Adonai in Hebrew, which means master.

They took the vowels from Adonai and inserted them into Y H W H that gave them Jehovah. And it goes through the languages. I mean, if that doesn't make sense to you, there's a big, long story behind this.