The pronunciation of God’s Name was settled in the English-speaking community a long time ago, but only among scholars. Through ancient Semitic and Greek texts, the conclusion on its pronunciation was widely accepted as “Yahweh”, but the suffix was not necessarily a hard “eh” sound only, as some also saw it as “ah”, as do we.
In the ancient Semitic texts, the suffix was almost universally “ah”, and some prominent, modern scholars agree, but the Greek sources on His name caused the western academic community to settle on Yahweh, versus Yahwah. Although ‘Yahweh’ remains the nearly universal consensus among biblical scholars and Semitists for the original pre-exilic pronunciation, ‘Yahwah’ or ‘Yahu’ah’ continues to be defended by a small number of researchers and is the form preserved in several living Jewish traditions (especially some Iraqi/Mizrahi and Karaite circles) right up to the 20th–21st centuries, ourselves included.
Someone recently asked me how we arrived at our conclusion, and I referred them to our articles on the topic. But, after the conversation, my curious mind wanted to go a bit deeper.
In referring them to our articles, however, I had first said that, way back in about 2005 or 2006, I was researching the topic online and I found an article from a small group of Jewish Rabbis in Israel. Those Jews had migrated to Israel from Iraq after the final destruction of the Jewish community there, which had been there since the time of Jeremiah the prophet [586 BC] and Daniel the prophet, all the way up until 1951 when they were airlifted out of Baghdad in “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah” due to pogroms there.
These Rabbis were interred in ‘ma’abarot’, or ‘transit camps’, and their culture immediately started to erode and disappear. But, they clung to their tradition.
Back in the early 2000s, many of them were very old, but they had some articles online about their tradition. I remember reading from one of those Rabbis’ articles about their pronunciation of His Name, and he said it was four vowels, and they were EE, AH, OO, AH, and that they blended when the Name was spoken at tempo. Basically, the ‘ee’ and the ‘ah’ form a diphthong that gives us the first syllable, as do the ‘oo’ and the next ‘ah’, to give us “Yahwah”.
We write it as Yahu’ah for clarity and to preserve the fact that they are vowels. This matches many ancient sources on the pronunciation of His Name:
Here are the ancient witnesses that explicitly say the Name consists of four vowels pronounced i – a – u – a (or very close variants). All of them pre-date the Masoretic vowel-pointing system by centuries or even a millennium:
| Source | Date | Exact Statement (or close paraphrase) | Pronunciation implied |
| Josephus, Jewish War 5.235 (writing ca. 75–79 AD) | 1st c. AD | The high-priest’s miter had four engraved letters which “are four vowels” (τὰ γράμματα φωνήεντα τέσσαρα). | I A Ū A → Yahuah |
| Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5.6.34 (ca. 190 AD) | late 2nd c. AD | “The Tetragrammaton … is pronounced Iaoue (Ἰαουέ) … the four letters are four vowels.” | Ia-ou-e → Yahu(e) |
| Theodoret of Cyrus (5th c.), Quaestiones in Exodum 15 (quoting older sources) | 5th c. AD | “The Samaritans call it Iabe (Ἰαβέ), the Jews Iaō (Ἰαώ), but the true pronunciation among the learned is Iae (Ἰαέ).” | All vowel sequences: i-a-(u)-e/a |
| Epiphanius, Panarion 40.5 (4th c.) | 4th c. AD | Samaritans pronounce it Iabe, but the real Hebrew form is Iaē (Ἰαή). | Again pure vowels |
| Papyri (PGM IV.3019–3022, etc., 2nd–4th c. AD) | 2nd–4th c. | Verses repeatedly invoke IAŌ OUA or as the “secret name of the God of Israel.” | I-A-Ō / I-A-U-A |
| Macrobius, 1.18.20 (ca. 430 AD) | 5th c. | “The name of the supreme god is Iaoūa among the Chaldeans and Hebrews” (explicitly four vowels). | Iaōua = Yahuah |
All of these sources agree on three crucial points:
- The four letters are treated as vowels (no consonantal “w” or “v” sound).
- The sequence is basically i – a – u – a (or i-a-ō, i-a-ou-e, etc.).
- This pronunciation was still known and used in priestly, Samaritan, magical, and some scholarly circles long after everyday Jews had stopped saying the Name aloud.
Modern scholarly reconstruction
Most linguists and biblical scholars who study the origin and form of ancient names now accept that the original pre-exilic pronunciation was something extremely close to Yahûah (יַהְוָה) or Yahūa — exactly the four-vowel form we found.
- The final -h is not pronounced (it’s a ‘mater lectionis’, the ancient Jewish concept of ‘mother of reading’, where a consonant works as a vowel), so it ends on an open “a” sound.
- The “waw” (ו) had shifted from /w/ to /u/ in late biblical Hebrew, which is why Greek sources write it as -ou- or -ua.
So when that Iraqi rabbi in ~2005 explained “four vowels: ee – aa – oo – aa” (i-a-u-a), he was not inventing something new or following fringe “sacred name” theories — he was repeating one of the most ancient and best-attested traditions we actually possess, a tradition that disappeared from mainstream Judaism after 70 AD but survived in pockets (Babylonian/Iraqi Jewish families, Samaritan priests, and esoteric circles) for many centuries.
In the conversation that started all of this, the Karaite Jews came up. These Jews are a small group of observant Jews who left the Rabbinic community about a thousand years ago. They disagreed with the Rabbis about the Talmud and all the later laws, and the notion of a ‘Second Law’, and that included the Rabbinic prohibition on saying His Name.
They concluded that the Name was spoken in the first Temple era, and way into the Second Temple era. It was not until the late Second Temple period that prohibitions against saying His Name were enacted. By Yeshua’s day, and up to 70 A.D., there was much division on the use of His Name. Hellenistic Jews and Pharisees began avoiding using His Name outside the Temple. The Pharisees were roughly only about 1.2% of the population! With their non-Pharisee supporters they were still less than 4%. They were heavily influential in the politics of the region, such that Herod made a Pharisee a High Priest, but they were a very small minority.
The Hellenized population of Israel was more significant. In Judea and Galilee they were about 25% of the population, but in Galilee, there was virtually no Hellenization whatsoever [adopting Greek culture and custom]. Galilee was in a cultural bubble, isolated from Jerusalem and the Decopalis, which were both far more hellenized. The Hellenized people would not say The Name, but more likely simply because they were not people of faith, having a bit of indifference toward it. In Galilee, however, where the Pharisees had far less of a presence, any injunction against using His Name would have been very hard to enforce. Galileans were far more casual about using His Name than those in Jerusalem, where the Pharisees could make life hard, having control of the Sanhedrin, the religious court of Israel.
In Galilee, and the rest of Judea, they spoke both Hebrew and Aramaic. The Pharisees there were very, very small in number, and they did not control the Synagogues there. This may be one of the very specific reasons God had Yeshua raised there versus anywhere else in Israel, including Bethlehem, where Miryam and Yosef were from. Culturally, Galilee was more like ancient Israel, versus what was going on in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea where Pharisees had more control. And there is no contest in academia that the Ancient Jews, from Moses all the way to the last prophet, spoke God’s Name aloud, even in daily life.
In Galilean Synagogues, they read from Hebrew Torah scrolls and scrolls of the prophets. They said His Name when they read from those scrolls. They likely did even in the Synagogues in other parts of Israel, as well. But, it was in Jerusalem where they only spoke His Name in the Temple.
The other major Judaic denomination, the Sadducees, disagreed with the Pharisees on the use of His Name. They said it. They did so even late in the game, against the wishes of the Pharisees, saying His Name in the Temple by the time the Pharisees demanded that it be blotted out with “Adonai”. The Sadducees boldly said His Name when the Pharisees demanded that they not do so.
It was not until after the destruction of the Temple when the Rabbanites [the new Rabbinic Community] institutionalized the substitution of God’s Name with “Adonai”, and then later, that wasn’t sufficient enough to blot out His Name, so they then instituted saying “HaShem” instead of יהוה . The Pharisees’ doctrine rules the day, and has since just after the destruction of the Temple.
But, the Jews who were still in ancient Babylon, “Iraq” today, were not part of that argument. The Babylonian Talmud tells us that they said His Name not only in the Temple when they were there on Pilgrim Feasts, but also in ordinary, daily life, like during prayers and when blessing meals. This went on there for centuries after the destruction of the Temple when the prohibition of saying His Name took root in Judaism in the west. These ‘mizraqi’ [eastern] Jews kept saying His Name, because there were no Pharisees there! And they were likely pronouncing it as do we: Yahu’ah. This does not mean we have proven it was the original pre-exilic form — most scholars hold out that Yahweh was the pronunciation in ancient Israel, all heavily influenced by the Septuagint and other Greek texts. But it does mean that a fully vocalized, eastern tradition of Yahu’ah survived in Babylon and Iraq for over 2,000 years, untouched by Pharisaic prohibitions. This, along with our other sources cited in our article, seems to give our argument more weight.
The further east and later we go in Jewish history for primary, Semitic and Middle Eastern sources, the more consistently we encounter this pronunciation — a powerful witness to an ancient stream of sacred tradition.
History shows that in some groups of Iraqi Jews, the use of His Name and that ancient pronunciation were used all the way into modernity, and the Rabbi I ran across in about 2005 affirmed it, though his website is no longer available.
From that community, which said the Name the way we do, Rabbi Kaduri created a big stir among all observant Jews in Israel back in 2006, right after I found the Iraqi-Jewish pronunciation of The Name. [I am not saying my finding was Kaduri’s website, but, it may have been someone’s in his inner circle, or from his general sphere of influence.] He was one of the exiles from Iraq, and by then was about 108 years old. He left a sealed note in his house that revealed the name of the Messiah! [Consider, our Jewish people do not believe in Yeshua. He may never have understood that “Jesus” was really “Yeshua”, because of his isolation from Christianity for over 100 years].
His note contained an ‘acrostic’ that read “Yarim Ha’Am Veyokhiakh Shedvaro Vetorato Omdim”. This reads “He will raise the people and prove that His Word and His Torah stand.” In Hebrew, the letters in bold are י ה ו ש ו ע, which is יהושוע, Yehoshua, the full spelling of “Joshua”, which is Yeshua’s Name. Nehemiah, the prophet that left Babylon to rebuild the Temple and Jerusalem, gave us the name of a man called Joshua spelled ישוע . Yeshua. [Nehemiah 8:17, and other verses in Ezra and Nehemiah].
Another thought or question that came to mind in that conversation was, are they any Jews today who actually say His Name?
Yes! The Karaite community has, for over 1,000 years. They emerged in Jerusalem back in the 8th and 9th Century A.D. One of their founders was Anan Ben David, and he explicitly rejected the authority of the Rabbinic “Oral” Law, including the tradition of blotting out God’s Name while reading or speaking.
The most influential of the early Karaite theologians was Yaqub al-Qirqisani of Baghdad and Jerusalem in the early 10th century. He wrote Kitāb al-Anwār wal-Marāqib (Book of Lights and Watchtowers), in which he devotes an entire chapter to proving that the Rabbinic prohibition on pronouncing the Name lacks any basis in Scripture, and in fact contradicts the written Word of God. That is also our conclusion. He posited that the Biblical pronunciation of His Name based on his knowledge of Hebrew is Yāhūwa or Yāhwa [very subtle differences], [Treatise 4 (on legal methodology and scriptural interpretation), Chapters 9–10] matching our conclusion, and other sources we have found from the Middle East in the same time period. He actually mocked the Rabbis for substituting “Adonai” for His Name, calling it a very late ‘innovation’.
Among early Karaite theologians, they all asserted that the Name was all vowels, but their pronunciations varied slightly over time. For us, the further back we go, all the Semitic sources on saying God’s name lead us to our pronunciation: Yahu’ah.
So, the latest additions we have to our ancient witnesses about the use and pronunciation of God’s Name give us further support for our long-held conclusions. These will be written into our articles in order to augment the support we already have for why and how we do what we do in regard to speaking the Name of God in private and in public. God keeps giving us affirmation even beyond the Scriptures that we are walking in Messiah’s footsteps.
Psalm 8:1 / 8:9 (closing) יהוה אֲדֹנֵינוּ מָה אַדִּיר שִׁמְךָ בְּכָל הָאָרֶץ
O יהוה our Master, how majestic is Your Name in all the earth!
Malakhi 1:1 כִּי מִמִּזְרַח שֶׁמֶשׁ וְעַד מְבוֹאוֹ גָּדוֹל שְׁמִי בַּגּוֹיִם וּבְכָל־מָקוֹם מֻגָּשׁ לִשְׁמִי
From the rising of the sun, to the going down thereof, My Name will be great among the nations, and in every place where incense [prayer] is offered to My Name.