The Tetragrammaton: the story of the divine name left unspoken

The Tetragrammaton is the name of God in the Hebrew Bible, made up of the four consonants yod, he, vav and he, usually transliterated YHWH. It occurs almost seven thousand times in the biblical text. Its original pronunciation is not known with certainty, because already in the Second Temple period Jews stopped saying it aloud outside worship, replacing it with other titles out of respect for its holiness. From this silence a long and complex history was born.

The name kept silent

According to the Mishnah, in the tractate Yoma, the name was pronounced by the high priest in the Temple on the Day of Atonement, and the people, hearing it, prostrated themselves. In ordinary reading it was replaced by Adonai, “my Lord”; later, in everyday speech, the expression ha-Shem, “the Name”, also spread. In the tractate Sanhedrin a saying attributed to Abba Shaul excludes from the world to come anyone who pronounces the name according to its letters.

The Masoretes, who between the seventh and tenth centuries fixed the vocalisation of the biblical text, placed under the four consonants the vowels of Adonai or, in certain contexts, of Elohim, to remind the reader of the word to be said in their place. They did not intend to indicate the original sound of the name, but to protect synagogue reading from an error considered extremely grave.

Kyrios, Iaoue and Jehovah

The Greek translation of the Septuagint, in Christian manuscripts, renders the name as Kyrios, “Lord”, and the Latin Vulgate does the same with Dominus. Some Greek fragments of Jewish origin, however, preserve the Tetragrammaton written in Hebrew letters within the Greek text. Ancient authors such as Clement of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrrhus record Greek forms like Iaoue and Iabe, which lead many scholars towards a pronunciation similar to Yahweh.

The form Jehovah, by contrast, arose from combining the consonants of the name with the vowels of Adonai. Already attested in the Middle Ages, it spread in the Renaissance, when the Franciscan Pietro Galatino used it in his De arcanis catholicae veritatis, published in 1518, and from there it passed into many Protestant translations of the Bible. Hebraists regard it as a hybrid reading that never existed as a real pronunciation in antiquity.

The name in Kabbalah and magic

For the kabbalists the Tetragrammaton is the name par excellence, linked to the whole system of the sefirot. Its gematria, 26, and the arrangement of its letters in a triangle, adding one letter per line, were the subject of long meditations. In the Renaissance Johannes Reuchlin, in his De verbo mirifico of 1494, proposed the Pentagrammaton, the name with the letter shin added in the middle, as the Hebrew name of Jesus.

In grimoires and on European amulets the name often appears in distorted Hebrew characters or in the Latin spelling Tetragrammaton, itself treated as a word of power and engraved on pentacles and medals. It is a typical case of transfer from a sacred text to a magical tradition that preserved its prestige rather than its meaning, often without any knowledge of the Hebrew language.

The Tetragrammaton sums up a paradox: the most important name in the Bible is also the one whose sound has been lost. The ritual silence surrounding it has produced substitutions, abbreviations, hybrid readings and mystical speculation, and has made four consonants one of the most meaning-laden signs in the religious history of the West and the Near East.