I. Name

Yahweh is the name of the official god of Israel, both in the northern kingdom and in Judah. Since the Achaemenid period, religious scruples led to the custom of not pronoucing the name of Yahweh; in the liturgy as well as in everyday life, such expressions as ‘the Lord’ (ʾădōnāy, lit. ‘my Lord’, LXX κύριος) or ‘the Name’ were substituted for it. As a matter of consequence, the correct pronunciation of the tetragrammaton was gradually lost: the Masoretic form ‘Jehovah’ is in r…