Names of God: Yahweh
The evening was dark, clear, and the ideal temperature, as evenings in Santa Barbara often are. I was enjoying my fancy plate of bread pudding drizzled with caramel, the first bread pudding I had ever eaten. I was nineteen years old, a poor college student, and feeling underdressed. My eyes were sweeping across the foothills, dabbled with small houses lit with holiday lights, angled toward the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish style, country house I stood in was decorated with charming detail, like I had walked into a ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ magazine. Soon I would be humbled to have the president of my college asking me questions about myself. It was an open house at his home, and simultaneously, I felt in over my head, and very privileged to be invited into the world of someone who was much more important than me. I was affected with gratitude at attending a school where I could visit the president’s house.
The name of God that we discuss today has this sharp, double edge of being both humbling and inviting.
It is the powerful name of Yahweh (pronounced yah-WEH). This is probably the single most important name for God in the Old Testament. Whereas many of the names we have discussed, like El’ohim, are words used throughout the Ancient Near East, Yahweh is the specific, personal name for the God of Israel.
This name is used over 6,000 times in the Old Testament. If you look closely, English versions of the bible will often translate the name with all capital letters as ‘LORD.’ When you say the word ‘Hallelu’YAH,’ you are expressing ‘praise Yahweh.’ You may have grown up with the pronunciation of this name as ‘Jehovah.’ For many centuries in the western world, the name was pronounced with the Jewish consonants, but Latin vowels.
Scholarship in the past century has accurately returned the word to its Jewish pronunciation of (yah-WEH). By the 3rd century BC, in its Jewish context, the name was considered too sacred to be uttered, and was replaced by ‘Adonai,’ a more general title meaning ‘Lord’, or ‘Sir’.
The formal introduction of the name came with Moses in the Midian desert. He saw a shrub on fire. He approached it and realized that it was burning without being consumed. God spoke to him from the unusual site, telling him to remove his sandals because he was standing on holy ground, and sending him back to Egypt to deliver the Israelite slaves. And
Moses asked, “What is your name so I can tell them?” and God replied “I AM WHO I AM, This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”…This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation” (Exodus 3:13-15). Each of the three places ‘I AM’ is translated in the previous verse is the name ‘Yahweh.’ But what does it mean?
The root of the name Yahweh is the Hebrew verb ‘to be, to exist, to live.’ In the name Yahweh, God reveals himself as the self-existent one, from whom flows everything that is. He is the origin of everything we see, and he sustains it according to his will. Without God, nothing would exist, not space, not planets, not green plants, not you or me.
The name Yahweh is expansive and intimidating. It includes the connotation that God doesn’t need us. He is existent and sufficient all by himself, which to our selfassured and knowledgeable 21st century sentiments can rub us wrong.
But over and over again in the Hebrew bible, the name Yahweh is used in the context of covenant relationship between God and His people. Like at the burning bush, where God reveals himself as holy and powerful, but simultaneously binds himself to Moses and the nation of Israel and says you will know me by this name “from generation to generation.” Yahweh doesn’t need us, but He wants us. In perfect selfsustaining freedom, He chooses out of a heart of love to enter into a binding, committed relationship with those that would receive him by faith.
To know God by his name Yahweh is like that poor college student that finds himself at the president’s house. You are in the presence of one far greater than yourself, but you are lovingly invited. God has a powerful, independent existence, but wondrously, He wants us.
Together in the Journey,
Fr. Cam Lemons
(Father Cam Lemons serves at St. Timothy’s Anglican Church. Service is at 9 a.m. on Sunday at 700 Hobson St. in Bishop. He also serves at Trinity Memorial Anglican
Church in Lone Pine. The service there is at noon at 220 N. Lakeview Road. For more information, go to StTimothysBishop.com.)