Yahweh
Pronunciation
- IPA: /ˈjÉ‘ËËŒweɪ/
Origin
The usual form of the ancient West Semitic (Hebrew) Hebrew יהוה used in scholarship.
Used especially in discussions of the religion of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
The spelling Jahweh was used in German since the 1850s. The spelling Yahweh in English (ensuring the pronunciation of the initial consonant as /j/) first appears in the 1860s.
As early as 1860 in the Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come edited by John Thomas, founder of the Antipas Christadelphians (vol. X. no. 1, Westchester, New York, January 1860).
Also used in some Bible translations for the Tetragrammaton, in the Emphasized Bible (1902), and since the 1950s in Bibles published by the "Sacred Name Movement", a current in US Adventism.
Full definition of Yahweh
Proper noun
Yahweh
(plural Yahwehs)- (history of religion) the name of the God of Israel worshipped by the Jahwist prophets in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in antiquity
- 1913 "No certain evidence for the pre-Mosaic use of the form Yahweh ... seems yet to have been brought forward." (H. W. Robinson, Religious Ideas of Old Testament, 3.53)
- (biblical) in "Sacred Name Bibles", translating the Tetragrammaton
- 1985 "At the time when Yahweh God made earth and heaven" (New Jerusalem Bible, Genesis 2:4)