mikester

ive seen these two words here and there and done some googling to try and get some answers, but im more confused now because of it.

whats the significance of the 'sacred name of god', all this YHWH and HWH word combinations? what is this Yahweh and all these other religious sects that have so many different beleifs about it?

i see gnostics, hebrews, christians, and even a few others that have drastically different theories and stories about these words, can somebody explain them to me in lehman's terms??

thanks.

matthias j.

YHWH because a) Hebrew doesn't have vowels b) you can't make any images of YHWH and since a word can be considered an image...

Toto

Tretragrammaton = 4 letters.

YHWH = a name for the God of the Old Testament.

The ancient Hebrews considered god's real name too holy to be uttered, so they used 4 letters, YHWH, which were translated as JeHoVaH in the King James Version.

You sometimes see religious Jews write "G-d" as if the generic term God were too holy to write out.

It's all based on primitive sympathetic magic - if you can say someone's name, you can control them, but no one should control God.

There's less to this than meets the eye.

mikester

i think i got it. thanks!

Shadowy Man

If I recall correctly this is the answer:

God says that his name is "I am that I am" or something like that, and in Hebrew that is four words.

If you make an acronym out of the first letter of each of those words you get:

yod hey vuv hey, or YHVH.

emotional

No, sorry, that's not correct.

"I am that I am" is ehyeh asher ehyeh, three words:

אהיה אשר אהיה

And it doesn't contain a vav. YHWH has a vav and looks like this:

יהוה

YHWH derives from the verb hayah "to be", but it is a variant form with a vav instead of a yod in it. Vav and yod are often interchangeable in Hebrew, and a Hebrew initial yod nearly always corresponds to waw in Arabic (it's called the Western-Semitic Consonant Shift).

nogods4me

Sounds more like Popeye to me.

Shadowy Man

Ok. Thanks for the correction.