Jehovah

The word 'Jehovah' is a 13th-century scholarly hybrid that became one of the most spoken divine names in Western history. Hebrew scribes, following the tradition of never pronouncing the divine name YHWH, wrote it with the vowel points of 'Adonai' (Lord) as a reading reminder. Christian scholars reading those manuscripts took the consonants of YHWH together with those vowel markings and produced the hybrid form 'Yehovah.'

The Dominican friar Raymundus Martini used a Latinized form in Pugio Fidei, his theological treatise written around 1270, making it one of the earliest known appearances of the blended name in print. William Tyndale's 1530 English Pentateuch introduced 'Iehouah' to English readers wherever the Hebrew text carried the Tetragrammaton. The King James Bible of 1611 used 'Jehovah' in four places where older translations had simply rendered it as 'Lord.'

By the 19th century, Hebrew philology had established that the original pronunciation of YHWH was almost certainly closer to 'Yahweh,' based on partial Greek transcriptions in patristic sources and comparative Semitic linguistics. Wilhelm Gesenius argued this case in his 1827 Hebrew grammar and lexicon. The form 'Jehovah' persisted nonetheless, embedded too deeply in Protestant hymnody and theology to yield to philological correction. Charles Taze Russell's religious movement, founded in the 1870s and later named Jehovah's Witnesses, made the form permanent across a global denomination.

Today both 'Jehovah' and 'Yahweh' appear in English religious texts, with denominations choosing according to tradition rather than etymology. The Roman Catholic Church typically uses 'Yahweh' in liturgical contexts; Jehovah's Witnesses use 'Jehovah' in their New World Translation. The word carries five centuries of printed tradition, even though every Hebrew philologist since the Enlightenment has known it rests on a medieval misreading of scribal notation.