His Name Is Yehovah

The Name That Was Hidden in Plain Sight

Open any English Bible to Exodus 3:15 and you will find this:

In the original Hebrew, that phrase "the LORD" is not a title. It is a name: four consonants — Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh — known as the Tetragrammaton, represented as YHWH. Yehovah said that this — not "LORD," not "Adonai," not "HaShem" — is His name forever. A memorial to all generations.

Yet for centuries the name has been systematically suppressed in reading and translation, replaced by the title "Lord." The result is that most people who love the scriptures have never heard the personal name of the God they worship. They know His titles. They do not know His name.

This is not a minor detail. It is the name He gave at the burning bush. The name He commanded to be proclaimed among all nations. The name that the prophets called on. The name Yeshua prayed to, taught about, and bore within His own name: Yah-shua — "Yah saves."

The Four Letters

The Tetragrammaton is composed of four Hebrew letters. Each carries meaning within the name itself.

The name is built from the Hebrew verb hayah — to be, to exist. It is the causative and continuous form: the One who causes existence, who was, who is, and who will be. When Yehovah told Moses "I AM THAT I AM" (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh), He was explaining His own name. "Tell them Yehovah sent you."

How the Name Was Suppressed

The tradition of not pronouncing the divine name developed in the Second Temple period, likely accelerating after the Babylonian exile. By the time of Yeshua, many scribes and readers had adopted the practice of saying "Adonai" (my Lord) wherever the name appeared in the text.

This was not a biblical command. Nowhere in Torah does Yehovah forbid speaking His name. On the contrary, He commands exactly the opposite.

The Third Commandment prohibits taking the name in vain — using it emptily, falsely, or to deceive. It does not prohibit reverent use. The tradition of non-pronunciation is a human fence built around the Torah, not a Torah command itself. The Masoretes who vocalized the Hebrew manuscripts, however, preserved the vowels with extraordinary care. That preservation is where Nehemia Gordon's research becomes decisive.

Nehemia Gordon's Manuscript Research

Nehemia Gordon is a Karaite Jewish scholar, Dead Sea Scrolls researcher, and Hebrew language expert who spent years examining medieval Hebrew manuscripts housed in libraries around the world. What he found overturned the widespread claim that the pronunciation of the divine name was irrecoverably lost.

The Aleppo Codex

The Aleppo Codex, written around 920 CE and considered the most authoritative Masoretic manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, preserves the vowel pointing for the divine name as Yehovah. This is not a marginal curiosity — it is the most carefully produced, most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in existence.

The argument that "the vowels were added by the Masoretes to represent Adonai" does not hold under examination. Gordon showed that if the Masoretes were substituting Adonai's vowels for the divine name, they would have used the vowels for Adonai consistently. They did not. The vowel pattern preserved in manuscript after manuscript follows a consistent pattern that cannot be explained by an Adonai substitution — it is the vowels for Yehovah.

Marginal Notes: The Key Evidence

One of Gordon's most compelling discoveries involves the margins of manuscripts. In the Masoretic tradition, scribes wrote extensive notes in the margins to protect textual accuracy. In many manuscripts, where the divine name appeared and the reader was meant to say "Adonai," the scribes wrote Qere notes in the margin indicating the substitution. But in those marginal notes themselves — where the scribes wrote casually, without the ceremonial weight of the main text — they sometimes wrote out the divine name with its full vowel pointing. What they wrote was not "Adonai." It was Yehovah.

Watch: Nehemia Gordon on the Divine Name

The Restoration and the Divine Name

Latter-day Saints have a particular reason to pay attention to this research. The early Restoration was saturated with the name Jehovah — the anglicized form of Yehovah that came into English through Latin and German renderings of the same Hebrew original.

The Doctrine & Covenants uses "Jehovah" in several revelations. The dedicatory prayer of the Kirtland Temple addresses "Jehovah" directly (D&C 109:34, 42, 56, 68). The endowment ceremony identifies Jehovah as the pre-mortal Yeshua. This is entirely consistent with the Hebrew: Yehovah is the name of the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the same one the New Testament identifies with Yeshua the Messiah.

What Gordon's research does is restore the Hebrew form of the name that the English "Jehovah" was always trying to render. "Jehovah" and "Yehovah" are the same name — the same four letters, the same vowels, different transliteration conventions across different centuries and languages. Knowing the Hebrew form takes us closer to the original. It is not a departure from Restoration usage; it is a return to its source.

Watch: The Name in Context

What This Means in Practice

Recovering the divine name is not about correctness for its own sake. It is about relationship. You cannot know someone you have never addressed by name. The scriptures do not give us anonymous divinity — they give us a God who names Himself, who places His name on His people, who instructs them to call on that name and to proclaim it among the nations.

In covenant context, using the divine name is not presumption — it is obedience. The command to sanctify His name, to hallow it, to not let it fall to the ground, means that His people must know it, speak it with reverence, and protect it from being forgotten or replaced.

Beginning to call on Yehovah by name is a small act with large implications. It changes how you read the scriptures. Every occurrence of "the LORD" becomes personal — His actual name, the memorial He asked for, the name He said would endure forever.