YHWH meaning

Meaning

He Who Causes That-Which-Is To Be & He Who Causes That-Which-Can't-Be To Fall

House Of Information Technology, House Of The Alphabet, House Of The Great Human Library

Etymology

From the verb הוה (hawa), which both means to be and to fall.

From the Hebrew "name" of the alphabet, formed from the three Hebrew vowels, plus the suffix of locality.

Related names

• Via יהוה (yhwh): Dabar-YHWH, YHWH-jireh, YHWH-nesi, YHWH-shalom

• Via יה (yah): See the 'browse by form' menu for a long list of yah-names.

The name YHWH is very old and it's generally assumed that the source texts of the Torah already contained it. It is similarly likely that the Book of the Covenant, which Moses read aloud to the Israelites, contained it too (Exodus 24:7).

For reasons we will discuss below, the Name became (or had always been) unpronounceable, and wherever the text called for YHWH, a reader would pronounce the Hebrew word for lord, namely Adonai. In the Middle Ages, the Masoretes began to fear that the traditional pronunciation of the written text might become lost and inserted symbols to help preserve it. That caused the pronunciation of the word Adonai to be linked to the spelling of YHWH, which in turn resulted in the impossible hybrid "name" Jehovah.

Other Jewish traditions handled the vocalization of YHWH by inserting the word Hashem, which is the word for "name" (see our article on Shem, which means name) plus the definite article: The Name.

The seemingly casual command to 'write' something on all doors (Deuteronomy 6:9) and hands and foreheads (Exodus 13:9) calls in fact for the invention of a writing system that could be mastered by everybody. This is a very big deal, and it resulted in the most powerful tool of data preservation up to this common age.

We moderns are so used to reading and writing that we often forget what an incredible miracle the alphabet is. It took many peoples many millennia to develop it and the main contribution of the Hebrews was the invention of vowel notation. Vowel notation was the capstone that completed the alphabet, and which made the previously esoteric art of writing and reading available to the masses. Prior to vowel notation, script was basically a mnemonic tool that helped specifically trained priests to memorize sacred texts. After it, script allowed anybody to be a priest, and give an entire nation a collective living memory (Exodus 19:6).

The alphabet quite literally allowed nations to become alive and be endowed with a singular living and thinking mind, in precisely the same way in which the Creator had once collected the dust of the earth into a viable body and infused into that body the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Much later, the Creator would do that exact same thing once again when he gathered believers into a viable body and infused into them the Holy Spirit (compare Genesis 13:16 to Galatians 3:7 and Acts 2:2). YHWH is the second creation name of God, as the Creator's name "changes" from Elohim, the Maker of Elements, to YHWH Elohim, the Applier of Elements, in Genesis 2:4 (see for a closer look at this our article on the Chaotic Set Theory).

And sure enough, modern information theory (starting with Claude Shannon in 1948) tells us that, indeed, the universe is basically a data-processing device that began its core business of storing and processing information as soon as there were particles to combine and arrange.

The Hebrew scribes who invented vowel notation didn't create new symbols for vowels but instead used symbols that already existed and until then had only represented consonants, namely the letters י (yod), ה (he), and ו (waw). And to give an example: the word דוד is either the monosyllabic dod, meaning beloved, or it is the disyllabic dawid, which is the name David. These three symbols became the markers for both the Hebrew identity and Hebrew theology, and ultimately formed the name יהוה (YHWH), not unlike the famous Hindu mantra AUM, which also represents the whole of everything whilst consisting of the three basic phonetic components of speech.

The Phoenicians had invented the consonantal alphabet to which the Hebrews added the vowels, and the story of Solomon and Hiram's mostly Phoenician temple in which YHWH came to dwell obviously reflects the birth of modern script (1 Kings 8:10-11). Writing didn't depend on a perishable human brain to retain data, which is why the Psalmist triumphantly exclaimed: "You will not allow your Holy One [i.e. the Word] to undergo decay" (Psalm 16:10, 49:9, Acts 2:27).

The word אל (El) was the name of the prominent Canaanite god, whose name was either derived of or became the common word for god in general. The plural of this word is אלים; gods. With the addition of the letter ה, creating the word אלהים, the Hebrews not only stated essential monotheism (by naming a single God after the plural word "gods") but also marked their God as theirs: Elohim is the singular pantheon of the vowel-people.

Something similar occurred when the name of patriarch Abram (אברם) was expanded with the he into Abraham אברהם, and the name of matriarch Sarai (שרי) was expanded with the he to Sarah (שרה).

All animals are, to some degree, conscious, both of themselves and of their environment. This dual consciousness culminates when animals look for a mate, and even a creature as small as a fruit fly won't settle for anything other than another fruit fly. But for conscious thought, words are needed. Without words, the consciousness of animals comprises subconscious thought. The subconscious thought of animals is identical to human subconscious thought, that is thought without words (and which is usually accompanied by vocal expressions other than words: Huh? Wah? Hey! Ah! Woohoo!).

Conscious thought is thought in words, and for that we need to know the names of things (Genesis 2:19-20). When we know names for things, it becomes much easier to organize our observations. And that makes it much easier to navigate our visible world.

When two people walk through the yellow woods, and one knows the names of all the dozens of different trees whereas the other knows only the word "tree", the first person will enjoy an exciting journey full of wonder and diversity, whereas the second will see only a big yellow wall of similar "trees". The first one will discern much more of the forest's ecosystem and will easily remember the paths she walked, whereas the second will feel miserably alien and lost in a world without landmarks.

Knowing the names of things is literally the same as speaking a language. When we don't know the names of things, we are like tourists in a country whose language we don't speak. We hear the words but we don't know their meaning, and we stand there lost and helpless.

When we have language, we know the names of things. But only the names of visible things, because just like we need names to keep things apart, so we need things to keep names apart. Without the visible things to try our words to, our words get jumbled in our head until they disappear in the mist of meaninglessness. Words are like muscles: we use them or lose them. That means that peoples who have no script, have no words for abstract concepts.

You can't see "things" like war or virtue or love and so people who have no written words, have no words for abstract things, and therefore have no conscious thoughts about any of these things. That means that the written word "love" functions in exactly the same way as a visible object: it gives a "tangible" body to an incorporate entity, so that a contemplative mind can juggle it around as if it were a physical thing (hence John 1:14). That's not to say that people without script have no thoughts about abstract ideas. They do, but they have thoughts about abstract ideas the way the wordless-walker walks though the yellow woods: mostly incapable of keeping things apart and seeing paths and seeing depth.

• Consciousness requires a brain of some sort: all animals are conscious to some degree. Consciousness is that which allows a brain to imagine the world at large. All consciousness is imagination, i.e. making an image, making a "portable" map-like reproduction of a much greater original.
• Conscious thought is thought-in-words; it requires language. Language is like an island of dry land that sits atop the vast ocean of consciousness. A "word" is a symbolic que, an instruction or a bit of code. Its function is to tell the mind what to imagine. When the mind detects the word, it generates the corresponding picture.
• Abstract thought is thought about real-but-invisible concepts. Abstract thought requires script. Script gives incorporate entities a "real" body, and allows incorporate entities to live among corporate entities, in a vast landscape that is peopled by words. In a world made of text, real things and abstract things live in harmony, side by side. Abstract concepts are labels for invisible and unmeasurable categories, whose effect are measurable (concepts like war, love, soul, God, faith: see Hebrews 11:1).

The less real, the more abstract. The less physical and measurable presence a concept has, the more abstract it is. A "thought", for instance, is usually expressed by spoken words, which means that a "thought" is mostly real and not so abstract. Slightly more abstract, "war" is a complex phenomenon that happens when very physical soldiers clash. You can measure the damage and noise, but not the anger and grief, so "war" is already rather abstract. Then, say, "virtue" is nearly wholly abstract because not all virtue immediately leads to a measurable advantage.

The more abstract an entity is, the more sophisticated our words need to be to describe them and give them a body for our minds to handle. God (and here's the grand unveiling), has zero physical presence in our world, which means that God is a hundred percent abstract. Even without script, God can be intuitively perceived (Genesis 4:26), but only the way the wordless-walker experienced the forest. God can only be consciously known, and thus interacted with, by means of the written word (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15).

This means that in a weird and marvelous way, all text is like a magic mirror in which we readers don't see ourselves but the very Creator (Psalm 12:6, 2 Timothy 3:16, 1 Corinthians 13:12).

We humans can get to know our Creator by simply reading; by simply walking through the wonderfully colorful world of text while practicing our words and following the paths of our choosing wherever they may lead. We humans do not get to know our Creator by repeating the sayings of some dude with a degree. It's certainly not a bad idea to listen to people with degrees, but our Creator is revealed by many voices, never just one.

God is utterly abstract and cannot be known by a mind that doesn't know how to think in abstract terms, which is an ability that we obtain by reading and by reading only (Romans 10:17). God is not in orthodoxy, not in instructions, not in methods, not in rituals, not in feelings and certainly not in blinding ecstasy. God is certainly not in a reversion back to hieroglyphs (modern icons and emojis), certainly not in YouTube clips, certainly not in sterile virtual realities or gaming environments. God is revealed by the unfathomable diversity and unpredictability of living nature (Romans 1:20), and in a constant exposure to the names of things.

God cannot be revealed by information. God cannot be represented by any graven image, not even when that graven image is sculpted from the best teachings by the most gifted visionaries. God can only be known by living, by having a living mind that walks and runs and plays and dances.

All private things are part of the body: all flesh, all blood, all observations, all sensations, all feelings no matter how elated. Spiritual "things" are things that only exist in two or more minds at once. Spirituality has nothing to do with our own sensations or private feelings, no matter how "spiritual" they may seem. Spirituality has to do with words, with the agreed names of things, with a shared experience of created reality, calm and composed. Love, ultimately, is a unified state of many minds, and minds only unify via words.

Paths are formed when people find their way, and others follow and begin to pave that way and build inns and restaurants and secondary infrastructures and all that. The Bible is a path that was formed over many centuries from the millions of footsteps of writers and editors and readers. A single human mind that exposes herself to the Bible (and that includes her peer's private perspectives on the Bible) is like a quantum particle that always covers all possible trajectories, or like water that continuously flows in and out of all pores and pathways. A mind like that is transformed according to the fabric of the Bible, and becomes one with it, with all others, and ultimately with God (John 17:20-26).

All effort that teaches anything but how to find one's own unique way on that ancient path is pagan. All religions are pagan, and all churches who teach people dogma are pagan. Real churches of God urge people to read their Bibles, without trying to shoehorn some theology into it. Real churches organize Bible readings, and maintain a kind of oral tradition by having people verbally retell the stories they read, and by organizing group discussions that explore the action, depth and applicability of the Bible stories.

The name YHWH may be an artificial construct of the Hebrew language's available vowels, which would be equivalent to our A-E-I-O-U. Better yet, the name YHWH may actually be YHW(H), where the final H is a common suffix that indicates formation (ever-growing place of, ever-expanding house of — a similar final H occurs with the name Pharaoh), and the first three letters the "name" by which the alphabet was known in Hebrew, equivalent to our English "name" for the alphabet: the alpha-beta, or the ABC.

If YHW is indeed the Hebrew way of saying ABC, the reason why the pronunciation of the Name was lost becomes immediately clear: it was never lost because it never existed. Since each of the three letters Y-H-W can either be pronounced as a vowel or as a consonant, the Name has eight possible basic pronunciations (including EEAAOO and Yahoo and YahaWa), and by choosing one we deny the other seven and simultaneously demonstrate that we don't actually know the Name.

YHW(H) ultimately describes Meaning, or better yet: Known Meaning, in the sense of Formally Known Meaning. And even if the name YHWH existed before the Hebrews began to note vowels (which is probable), they may have chosen for their vowel-symbols the letters that made up the already existing name of their deity. That means that the name YHWH may be a proper word, derived of some verb, which subsequently came out existing of only vowels. If that is so, the etymology of YHWH is utterly unclear, and therefore subject to much debate.

The key scene in this respect seems to be Exodus 3:13-15, where God names himself first: אהיה אשר אהיה (I AM WHO I AM), then אהיה (I AM), and finally יהוה (YHWH) and states that this is his name forever and a memorial name to all generations.

It has been long supposed that YHWH was derived from the verb that is used to make I AM, namely היה (haya), meaning to be or to become, or rather from an older form and rare synonym of haya, namely הוה, hawa, hence y-hawa or yahweh, the proper imperfect of the verb, thus rendering the name either BEING or HE IS. (But note that the Hebrew language is far more dynamic than our modern languages. The verb to be indicates an action that intimately reveals the nature of the one who is doing the acting. For more on this, see our article To Be Is To Do):

HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament goes even further as it states, "...there is a problem with the pronunciation Yahweh. It is a strange combination of old and late elements.[...] In view of these problems it may be best simply to say that YHWH does not come from the verb hawa at all. [W]e may well hold that YHWH [...] is an old word of unknown origin which sounded something like what the verb hawa sounded in Moses' day. However, if the word were spelled with four letters in Moses' day, we would have expected it to have had more than two syllables, for at that period all the letters were sounded". Meaning: if people in the time of Moses indeed wrote the Name as יהוה, and they would have still pronounced it, it would have sounded like Yahay Wayhay.

In other words, the name YHWH looks like a hybrid of times, as if it cannot be localized but spans centuries of evolving grammar. Then it also looks very much as if it was derived of a verb that means to be, but which is spelled differently than the regular verb to be, and similarly to a verb that means something very bad. Perhaps all this confusion, or rather, this wide pallet of negotiations is what this Name most essentially conveys: existence in its broadest sense, yet unlike any regular human perspective; a blessing to the wise, but the undoing of the wicked.

On the other hand, perhaps the name YHWH means Tom, Dick or Harry in a language that has slipped out of the collective human consciousness and we are left with the echoes of a revelation that was as sincere and confidential as the word abba: daddy.

After all this it should be clear that the name YHWH can't be readily interpreted.

If we're dealing with an expression of the verb הוה (hawa II), and we maintain that this verb means to fall, then YHWH would mean Falling, or He Will Fall or He Will Cause To Fall. This line of reasoning may seem to lack any trace of sound theology, but the divine name Shaddai reflects a similar negative, and may mean My Destroyer. The prophet Isaiah writes, "Wail, for the day of YHWH is near. It will come as destruction (shad) from Shaddai" (Isaiah 13:6).

But perhaps we have the verb הוה (hawa II) all figured wrong, and הוה (hawa II) is the same as הוה (hawa I), meaning to be or to happen. Then YHWH would comfortably mean Being or He Is or He Will Cause To Be.

Here at Abarim Publications we are most charmed by this particular explanation. Time and again the Bible urges its readers to focus only on that which is real — whether physical or abstract — on "That Which Is", and steer clear from superstitions and nonsense. To the modern world, Yahwism may seem like just another religion but to the ancients it wasn't. The Jews were known as the people without a god (meaning without an effigy) and it appears that Christians in the Roman empire may have been accused of atheism (again meaning without a visible deity; see Cassius Dio 67.14).

Even though the name YHWH is etymologically difficult to explain, to a Hebrew audience it may have looked very much like He Who Causes "That Which Is" To Be.

Yahwism, therefore, can be most aptly viewed as a kind of proto-science; it's the syntax of science and focused on reality first and foremost. And no, Yahwism is not a religion that appeared to work really well; it's the syntax of science that worked really well which received the name Yahwism. Where the vast majority of pagan religions venerate society's stratification, Yahwism emphasizes the importance of the individual (hence the idea of YHWH's Christ being Jesus of Nazareth; the quintessential Average Joe). Pagan religion wants blind obedience; Yahwism wants insight and responsibility. Pagan religion wants a reverential and essential gap between the holy and the profane; Yahwism dictates that God wants to fellowship with mankind — and just pause to dwell on that for a bit.

There are over a hundred references in the Old Testament alone of the Lord stating that he will or wants to be with us (Genesis 26:3, Exodus 3:12, 1 Chronicles 28:20, Isaiah 53:5, Job 29:5), and although we moderns are probably used to that idea, there is nothing like this to be found in any of the cultures that surrounded Israel during Biblical times. The name Immanuel expresses purely a Yahwistic concept (Isaiah 7:14), as obviously does the Word of the Lord becoming flesh, dwelling among us (John 1:14), and appointing disciples "that they might be with Him" (Mark 3:14).

Here at Abarim Publications we love science (and if you haven't already, check out our articles on quantum mechanics and chaos theory) but we are privately convinced that there is a greater source of knowledge than science. Or let's rephrase that: it seems to us that Yahwism in its natural form is the great unrecognized foundation of science and any kind of veritable knowledge. We know beyond doubt that there are Yahwists among us who know far more than any scientist; they don't publish and that's why the general public doesn't know about them, but they are there.

Our brains are made up of particles that have been around since the beginning of time, and just like ants must build an ant-hill in obedience to ant DNA, so must mankind come up with a model of reality in obedience to human DNA. In other words: the whole picture lies in our hearts, and that which we call inspiration or having a hunch, or even simply an idea for a hypothesis, comes straight from our heart of hearts (Deuteronomy 30:14, Jeremiah 31:33, Romans 2:15, Hebrews 10:16). The trouble humanity faces is that we've been believing and teaching each other the wrong things; we look in a mirror dimly, so to speak (1 Corinthians 13:12), and our thinking has to be renewed (Romans 12:2).

A mind which is trained in Yahwism will automatically be good at science, whereas a mind which is trained in paganism will automatically jump too quickly to conclusions and will base these conclusions on emotions rather than observations. Whether science will lead to bliss or to destruction depends wholly on whether man worships his knowing self or the Creator (for more on this, see our article on the familiar word Amen).

Also have a look at our articles on the Greek word πιστις (pistis), meaning "faith" and the word θεος (theos), meaning God.