On the day before yesterday, I submitted an article to the Pentecostal Life magazine titled “Yahweh, Jehovah, and Jesus.” I wrote the article by request, and it is scheduled to appear in the August 2019 issue, which will focus on the Oneness of God.

The objective of the article is to explore the use of quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament that identify Jesus as Yahweh or Jehovah. The word Yahweh is the transliteration of the third person singular form of the Hebrew verb by which God revealed Himself to Moses, as recorded in Exodus 3. God told Moses to tell the Israelites in Egypt that he had been sent by I AM (Exodus 3:14), which is the first person singular form of the same verb. Yahweh means “He is” or “He will be.”

The word Jehovah is a transliteration of the same verb, taking into account the vowel pointing inserted into the four Hebrew consonants that form YHWH (i.e., Yahweh). There were no vowels in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, only consonants. In later biblical Hebrew, during the monarchy, some consonants began to represent traditional vowel sounds, and the Masoretes, scribes who worked from the sixth to the tenth centuries A.D., developed a system of pointing – we might call it “dots and dashes” to represent traditional vowel sounds. This system was employed in Hebrew manuscripts to insert the vowel sounds for the word Adonai into the Tetragrammaton (the four consonants of YHWH) to alert readers not to vocalize the name of God but to say “Adonai” instead. To pronounce the vowels of Adonai with the consonants for Yahweh resulted in Jehovah.

This post is not a duplication of the article. It is additional information. I hope you will read the article and the others that will appear in this issue of Pentecostal Life in August. If you’re not already a subscriber to the magazine, I recommend subscription. Each issue is filled with excellent articles, with a complete section designed to be used in small group Bible study.[archive]