YHVH

Etymology

The Hebrew Bible explains it by the formula אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה‎ (’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye pronounced [ʔehˈje ʔaˈʃer ʔehˈje] transl. he – transl.I Am that I Am), the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14.^[6]

This would frame Y-H-W-H as a derivation from the Hebrew triconsonantal root היה (h-y-h), "to be, become, come to pass", with a third person masculine י (y-) prefix, equivalent to English "he",^[7][8] in place of the first person א ('-), thereby affording translations as "he who causes to exist",^[9][10] "he who is",^[8] etc.; although this would elicit the form Y-H-Y-H (יהיה‎), not Y-H-W-H.

To rectify this, some scholars proposed that the Tetragrammaton represents a substitution of the medial y for w, an occasionally attested practice in Biblical Hebrew as both letters function as matres lectionis; others proposed that the Tetragrammaton derived instead from the triconsonantal root הוה (h-w-h), "to be, constitute", with the final form eliciting similar translations as those derived from h-y-h.

As such, the consensus among modern scholars considers that YHWH represents a verbal form, with the y- representing the third masculine verbal prefix of the verb hyh "to be", as indicated in the Hebrew Bible.^[11]