What Is God’s Name? The Meaning of YHWH (& Other “Names”)

What is God’s name? God answers in Isaiah 42:8:

I am the LORD; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other;
nor my praise to carved idols.

But what kind of name is “the LORD,” and why do most modern English Bible spell it in all caps?

The answer is, like many important things in Scripture, complex but worth knowing (though not worth obsessing over.) We’ll travel through biblical Hebrew and back again to find answers. We’ll encounter both sensitive controversies and fundamental mysteries.

We’ll also meet some other “names of God” that don’t perhaps rise to the level of “the LORD.”

Let me propose three questions that will structure our inquiry here:

1. What is the meaning & significance of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH?
2. What are the names of God & their meanings?
3. So what?

1. What is the meaning & significance of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH?

Very simply: “the LORD” (all caps) is a translation of the Hebrew word יהוה (Yahweh). This is distinguished from “the Lord” (without small caps), which translates a different Hebrew word: אָדוֹן (adonai), meaning “lord” or “master.”

Most people today, for reasons I will explain, pronounce Yahweh as “YAH-way.” But the structure of Hebrew makes it possible to write the language without vowels, and the only letters we are certain of in the word are actually the four consonants: YHWH. So we don’t actually know how it was originally pronounced.

This four-consonant spelling of the name of God is called the Tetragrammaton, which means “four letters” (Greek tetra-, “four”; grammaton, “letter”). The Tetragrammaton does appear in some manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.

Words mean what native speakers use them to mean. And Yahweh is no exception. Were you to use the Logos Bible Word Study to survey all the places in the Hebrew Bible where this word occurs, it would take you some time to work through them, as it appears nearly seven thousand times. But you would find that Yahweh is simply the name for God.

Names have etymological meanings, so we might wonder what Yahweh means. But when does your name ever mean its etymological roots? My name is Mark. It technically means (meant?) “warlike” and is connected to Mars, the Roman god of war, but I have never heard any native speaker of English use my name to communicate anything about war or warlikeness.

When people use our names, what they mean is us. No deeper meaning need be sought. Similarly, in most instances it appears, I think Yahweh is just God’s name. It doesn’t bear any deeper meaning.

Choosing at random, here’s a verse from the Hebrew Bible that uses the word Yahweh:

Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses’ father-in-law, heard of all that God had done for Moses and for Israel his people, how the LORD had brought Israel out of Egypt. (Exod 18:1)

What I find interesting about this verse is that “God” (אֱלֹהִים, elohim) and “the LORD” are used interchangeably—in almost poetic parallelism. Both are used to point to the same referent, the same “object”: the deity of eternal power who created the world, chose Abraham, and made Israel his spouse.

Most of the time, Yahweh simply points to the one true God.

Humor me a little. Read a few other uses of Yahweh (“LORD”) in the Old Testament:

“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Ps 34:8)

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart.” (Prov 3:5)

“They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength.” (Isa 40:31)

“The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge.” (Ps 18:2)

It’s reading these descriptions of him, along with manifold others in Scripture, that ought to tell you who he is—what Yahweh means. The meaning of the word itself is comparatively less important.

It’s reading these descriptions of him, along with manifold others in Scripture, that ought to tell you who he is—what Yahweh means.

“I am who I am”

But not exactly unimportant. Because the LORD is, by (the Bible’s) definition, a unique being who chose his own name. And his name, the word itself, does reveal something about him.

Our only evidence of the meaning of Yahweh is a key conversation God has with Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3. There God says this, in words you may know (and I’ll bold all words related to YHWH):

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”

And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exod 3:13–15 ESV)

The first three instances of “I am” in this passage are forms of the Hebrew word “to be.” Technically, they are “Qal imperfects,” but even if you have no idea what that means, you can run a search in Logos for this precise form of the verb, and you’ll see how it is usually translated. I’ll bold it again:

“I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” (Exod 4:12 ESV)

And the Lord commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, “Be strong and courageous, for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land that I swore to give them. I will be with you.” (Deut 31:23 ESV)

And the Lord said to him, “But I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man.” (Judg 6:16 ESV)

Normally, then, this verb form used in God’s famous “I am who I am” statement to Moses is translated in first-person future tense as “I will be.”¹

The final bolded words in that Exodus 3 passage above—“the LORD”—translate a proper noun that is clearly based on the Hebrew word for “to be.” Exodus 3 is the key passage telling us what Yahweh means.

This key paragraph in Exodus 3 has occasioned much discussion, of course, but one view on the interplay of these YHWH words is reaching consensus. Let me share a quote on the view before I tell you who said it:

God in his conversation with Moses in Exodus 3 speaks the way he does—“I AM WHO I AM”—in order to attributes divine glory to himself alone. This odd choice of words tells us that God is self-existent and therefore eternal. He is the one who (alone!) gives being and existence to every other creature who has those things. And when he describes himself to Moses, he speaks of himself in ways no one else can share. He claims an eternality that is his alone, in order that he may be honored according to his dignity.

And therefore, immediately after his startling self-description in Exodus 3:13–14, and contrary to Hebrew grammatical usage, he uses in 3:15 the same verb in the first person—but this time as a substantive, a noun: Yahweh, “the LORD.” And he attaches to this noun a verb in the third person: “The LORD … has sent me to you.”

I expanded and clarified and modernized a bit, but these are essentially the words of Reformation-era exegetical superhero John Calvin in his excellent commentaries.² This consensus view of the meaning of Yahweh, then, is at least five centuries old. And if you didn’t quite follow all that Calvin said, I urge you to go back through it. Then pick up a good study Bible like the ESV Study Bible or the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible or—a personal favorite—the NET Bible, and read carefully the notes on Exodus 3:13–15. Then graduate to more commentaries. Then perhaps pick up some systematic theologies that employ Exodus 3 in their discussions of the doctrine of God.

I was able to piece most of this together before I knew any Hebrew. God is clear even in translation that there is a purposeful relationship of meaning between “I AM” and “the LORD.” So though “LORD” mainly refers, it also reminds. Every so often, when you see “the LORD” referring to—naming—the one true God in Scripture, you should remember Exodus 3 and the claim within God’s name to eternal independent self-existence.

Israel in the old covenant and the church in the new is wedded to, chosen by, loved and saved by, a God who does not need us—but who “will be” with us as our God (Jer 11:4; Matt 28:20; Rev 21:3). There is tantalizing mystery and profound truth in the name Yahweh.³

Different Bible translations & YHWH

An academic note, and then a warning: A few Bible translations do transliterate the Tetragrammaton rather than translate it. They mimic the sounds of Hebrew using English letters, using “Yahweh” rather than “the LORD.” The recent Legacy Standard Bible does this, as did the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Here’s a random example from the LSB:

Now it will be that in the last days
The mountain of the house of Yahweh
Will be established as the head of the mountains,
And will be lifted up above the hills,
And the peoples will stream to it. (Mic 4:1)

I like this, but I don’t love it. I respect it, but I don’t prefer it. And here’s my warning: Don’t fall prey to any party spirit (or marketing copy) that says, We have lost the divine name, and the only way to restore it is to use it, both in Bible translation and in our worship—like our group does. We have rescued God’s name from obscurity, and we pity the benighted Christians who have not yet been enlightened by our insight.

I have what I believe to be a nice, knock-down argument against this way of thinking: Jesus could have used the word Yahweh himself, but did not. In the New Testament, he and the apostles consistently translated Yahweh when they quoted the Old Testament rather than transliterating it. They weren’t fussy about its use. Yahweh occurs never in the pages of the Greek New Testament. Instead, we find consistently the word κύριος (kurios), the Greek for “Lord.” If Jesus used “Lord” to speak and refer to his Father, surely it is no sin for us to follow suit.

Jehovah & superstitious treatment of the divine name

And now a bonus warning.

Hebrew experts with a far better feel for the language than my own don’t seem to agree unanimously on which vowels ought to go inside the Tetragrammaton. Yahweh is, again, the most popular educated guess, and it has effectively become an English word among educated Christians. But God let the correct/original/preferred pronunciation of his name be lost to history—so maybe we don’t need to be fussy about it. We certainly don’t need to be superstitious or fractious or bumptious about it.

Bonus bonus warning: Jehovah is a colossal, unrepealable European mistake. It apparently arose when medieval readers (?) of the Hebrew Bible misunderstood the Jewish scribes’ scrupulous custom of interpolating the vowels of adonai into the consonants of yhwh. “Jehovah” has since become, by common usage, one of the ways to pronounce “Yahweh,” so I don’t mind singing at church, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.” Let’s not get fussy about something God chose not to reveal with full clarity. But I certainly wouldn’t make “recovery” of this title the linchpin of an Arian revival movement (let the reader understand).

Yahweh is good to know, bad to divide over or become superstitious about.

2. What are the names of God & their meanings?

Compared with Yahweh, the other “names” of God in the Bible are less like names and more like titles.

Here are the top ten alternative “names”—or titles, or name-like descriptions—of the God of Scripture, with brief and introductory comments regarding each.

1. God gets used as a name and a title in both testaments. “God” is the most common way the New Testament refers to the one “with whom we have to do” (Heb 4:13 KJV). The word “God” in Hebrew is, fascinatingly, grammatically plural—though it occurs with singular verbs. Anyone working through the study of God’s names has to face the question of whether and how this grammatical oddity might be significant. I have argued that this oddity is not significant, but you may do your own study and choose to differ.
2. Lord God (יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים, Yahweh Elohim) is a way of combining the cosmic and generic creator “God” with the covenantal and personal Yahweh.
3. Likewise, Lord God—this time rendering the Hebrew אֲדֹנָי יְהוִה (Adonai Yahweh)—combines the generic “God” with the recognition of God’s authority in adonai, meaning “lord” or “master.”
4. Lord of Hosts is an archaic way of saying what the Hebrew Yahweh sabaoth really means: “Lord of Armies.” And he is that. He’s Lord of armies of angels, at least. And the “hosts of heaven” we call the stars also fight for Yahweh (see Judg 5:20).
5. The simple word Lord, in Hebrew adonai (which has itself become an English word among Christians who know the praise songs that use it), uses a common title ancient peoples gave to their earthly authorities to ascribe authority to God. Adonai is not used only of God in the Old Testament, but also of mere humans (Gen 42:10).
6. Lord God of Israel links the creator God to a very specific people in real history (Exod 32:37) without limiting his divine authority to that particular group (Gen 12:3).
7. Most High makes clear what any reader of the Bible knows from the very first page (Gen 14:18).
8. Almighty (אֵל שַׁדַּי, El Shaddai; Gen 17:1 and many other passages) is a theological claim if there ever was one, a boast that is not a boast only because it is perfectly true.
9. Holy One of Israel (2 Kgs 19:22 and many other passages) again ties the transcendent God to the very immanent people of God.
10. Master (δεσπότης) is a New Testament way of referring to the divine with a common earthly title, one used for divine (Luke 2:29) and earthly (1 Tim 6:1) holders of it.

I could make this list longer. There are also names specific to the Father, Son, and Spirit (indeed, “Father” and “Son” and “Spirit” are the most important). I will now present a few for the Son and Spirit.

See Logos’s Names of God interactive for a list of names and a bunch of convenient links to more information. Start a free trial!

Names for the Son

• The Son calls himself Son of Man, which, like the next name, is a reference to the Son as incarnated, living in human flesh as true man (see Matt 9:6).
• The Son is Emmanuel, which is actually called a “name” in Matthew 1:23. This is one of the relatively few words in Scripture whose meaning comes straight from its etymology: It is a combination of the Hebrew words for the “with-us-God” (im–manu–el).⁴
• The Son is Christ (John 4:25) or Messiah (John 1:41). Christ is simply the Greek translation of the word מָשִׁיחַ (mashiach) in Hebrew, from which we get messiah: both mean “the anointed one.” Christ’s anointing makes him fit to inherit the throne of his father David and to sit on David’s throne forever, in fulfillment of the Davidic covenant of 2 Samuel 7.
• The Son, indeed, is Son of David a messianic title used especially by Jews who cry out to Jesus in praise or supplication in the Gospel of Matthew.⁵
• People who knew Jesus on earth called him Master (2 Pet 2:1) or Teacher (Matt 8:19) or Rabbi (John 3:2)—or, indeed, Lord (too many passages to list—but see figure below).

Names for the Spirit

• The Spirit is called a helper or advocate. In Greek, this is παράκλητος (John 14:16; 15:26; 16:7), and this has become a rare but known English word, Paraclete. This word calls up the Spirit’s role in comforting and coming alongside believers in Christ.
• The Spirit is called the Spirit of God (Gen 1:2; 1 Cor 7:20), the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4), and even the Spirit of Christ (Rom 8:9; 1 Pet 1:11).

Each of these “names” functions less like a name than like something else. Indeed it is difficult to call these “names.” Titles, maybe? Descriptive titles? Or we can sound fancy and call them “appellations.”

Descriptive “names” of God

There are also creative or descriptive “names” of God—and most people searching for “the names of God” on the internet probably expect to hear about these. These, too, are more descriptions than they are names.

• God of seeing translates אֵל רֳאִי (El-Roi)—in fact, the Common English Bible uses “El-Roi” where most other translations use “God of seeing” (Gen 16:13). Hagar names God this when God sees her need in a time of distress.
• God of providing translates the very similar יְהוָה יִרְאֶה (Yaweh-jireh) in Genesis 22:14, from a passage in which Abraham “names” God as provider for providing a sacrificial ram at the dramatic sacrifice of Isaac.
• Everlasting God is a title/name that appears three times in Scripture, twice in the Old Testament and once in the New (Gen 21:33; Isa 40:28; Rom 16:26). Its meaning is self-evident.
• The living God appears about thirty times in Scripture. As the UBS Handbook on Deuteronomy says, “This title contrasts Yahweh with the gods of other peoples, gods who were powerless, dead, lifeless idols. A translation may bring this out by translating ‘The only living God.’ This contrasts well with human ‘flesh,’ mortal humankind.”⁶ Much as calling Lebron James “the King” not-so-subtly demotes all other basketball players to his vassals, so “the living God” is an insult to all other very-lower-case-g “gods.”

3. So what?

Why does knowing the meaning of YHWH and the other names of God—Father, Son, and Spirit—matter for Christians today?

I wish it weren’t so, but some knowledge of the basics of God’s names in Hebrew and Greek seem to be as helpful for inoculating Bible readers against error as it is for teaching them truth. That is, countless believers throughout time have spoken to God and about God with no knowledge of the original languages of Scripture, and therefore no knowledge of the Hebrew word Yahweh or the Greek word kurios. And the Bible itself, specifically Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament, do not seem to be fussy about what name is used for God—but instead are insistent mainly on his character, plan, and mighty acts. His names are entries on a list, mere bones, without the flesh of the narrative(s) of Scripture.

Knowing God’s names in Hebrew and Greek probably won’t deepen your personal worship and prayer life, because you’ll probably keep referring to him with the words your language uses—Lord, Señor, l’Éternel, Bog, etc.—even after learning that his “real name” is Yahweh. And I see nothing wrong with that. The Holy One of Israel told Israel’s (Jacob’s) grandfather that he wanted to bless all the families of the earth through the holy Abrahamic seed. And he gave no instructions to make sure that Yahweh remained his name among all those families. We don’t even know how to spell it.

I see two primary theological values in knowing the basics about God’s name:

1. Knowing the meaning of God’s name means getting all-important revelation in the realm of what systematic theologians call “theology proper,” the theology of God himself. Concretely: God is self-existent and eternal,⁷ and he reveals these facts in the midst of a very much in-time and over-time relationship with his chosen people. But let me try briefly to restate my concerns from earlier: If you could have only the meaning of God’s name or the descriptions of his mighty acts in Scripture, I think you should choose the latter. To have only the former is to have a philological puzzle and a few bullet points in a systematic theology textbook. To have the latter is to know God.⁸
2. A important as it is to connect the sacrificial lambs of the Old Testament economy to the once-for-all sacrificial Lamb of the New Testament, it is important to know that Jesus allows himself to be referred to as “the LORD,” identifying himself with the God of the Old Testament. When John comes to prepare the way for Jesus, he prepares “the way of the Lord”—κύριος in Greek (Matt 3:3), quoting Yahweh in Hebrew (Isa 40:3). The most fundamental Christian confession, “Christ is Lord” (Phil 2:11), is a rich theological claim that Jesus is not merely the fulfillment of the promises of the first three quarters of the Bible, but is himself the creator God.

Get those two points, and I think you get the most important contribution that understanding the name of God will give you. Of course, however, neat bullet points made about eternal self-existent beings threaten to be too tidy. The category “names of God” bleeds over into “biblical descriptions of God.” There is surely more to discover in studying these divine names, therefore. And I encourage you to try.

Resources for exploring the names of God

Related content

• What Does Yahweh Mean?
• Who Is the Angel of the Lord and What Is the Name of Yahweh?
• “See to This”: The Meaning of “Jehovah Jireh” in Genesis 22
• 2 Reasons Why ‘Jehovah’ Should Not Appear in English Bibles
• What Does It Mean to Take God’s Name in Vain? | Carmen Joy Imes on Exodus 20:7

1. “The imperfect tense in Hebrew does not denote continued action (which is expressed by the participle), but either reiterated (habitual) or future action. The reiteration expressed by it may belong to either the past (as Gen. 2:6 ‘used to go up’) or the present (as Gen. 10:9 ‘it is wont to be said,’ Ex. 18:15 ‘are wont to come’).” S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis, with Introduction and Notes, Westminster Commentaries (Methuen & Co., 1904).
2. Read the original quote in John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, vol. 1, ed. Charles William Bingham (Logos Bible Software, 2010), 73.
3. There is, of course, a lack of final definition in the name Yahweh. But, as with all names, this is simply to recognize the limits of drawing inferences from the name regarding the nature of the one whose name it is.” Willem VanGemeren, ed., New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis (Zondervan, 1997), 1296.
4. The New Testament writers were perfectly capable of transliterating important Hebrew words into Greek, as they did with emmanuel in Matthew 1:23 and messiah in John 1:41 and 4:25. That they did not do so with Yahweh helps corroborate my one “polemical” thread in this article: We need not turn this word into a theological-tribal shibboleth.
5. Click here to run a search in Logos for all the places where Jesus is called “Son of David.”
6. Robert G. Bratcher and Howard A. Hatton, A Handbook on Deuteronomy, UBS Handbook Series (United Bible Societies, 2000), 131.
7. Exodus 3:14 is the passage cited by Westminster Confession 2.1 as support for the statement that God is “most absolute.”
8. I go on about this point not because I particularly fear the Jehovah’s Witnesses but because I feel a rise in superstition about YHWH in evangelical Protestantism itself—and only one friend of mine sees the same problem I do. People always want to find a hidden key that they can melt down into a silver bullet that will hit the nail of sanctification on the head of perfect doctrinal soundness. For some, that key/bullet/hammer is getting God’s name “right.”