Judaism's most frequent name for God has gone unspoken for over two thousand years
The four Hebrew letters YHWH appear 6,828 times in one standard edition of the Hebrew Bible, yet nobody knows for certain how they were once pronounced. By at least the 3rd century BCE Jews had stopped saying the name aloud, and many today even avoid writing the numbers fifteen and sixteen the usual way.
Hebrew script records consonants and usually leaves vowels out, so the Tetragrammaton reached later readers as bare letters. Vowel marks were added to biblical manuscripts only in the early Middle Ages, and by then the scribes of the Masoretic Text deliberately attached the vowels of Adonai or Elohim to it, signalling which substitute word to read. Linguists think the name is an ancient form of the verb to be, roughly meaning he is, was or will be, matching the Exodus scene where God answers Moses with I Will Be What I Will Be.
Nothing in the Torah itself forbids saying it, and the Book of Ruth suggests it was still spoken in the 5th century BCE. Rabbinic tradition later restricted it to the High Priest, who uttered it only on Yom Kippur inside the Holy of Holies while the crowd in the courtyard lay face down. Since the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, most Jews read Adonai, my Lord, in prayer and say HaShem, the Name, in conversation. Karaite Jews once treated pronouncing it as a religious duty, though most now use Adonai too, and English Bibles usually print the LORD.
Protection spread outward over time. Certain names, once written, may not be erased: YHWH, Adonai, El, Elohim, Shaddai, Tzevaot and, for some, I Am that I Am, as well as the short form Jah. Because Adonai became the everyday stand-in, it too became too holy for many Orthodox Jews to say outside prayer, and prayer books often print two small yods instead. The same caution explains writing G-d in English, and writing fifteen as nine-plus-six, since ten-plus-five would spell Jah.
Elohim poses its own puzzle. It is grammatically plural, identical to the ordinary word for gods, yet takes singular verbs when it means the God of Israel. Some explain it as a plural of power or majesty, others as an abstract noun meaning divinity, like chayyim for life. The scholar Mark S. Smith has suggested the form may preserve traces of how early Israelite belief moved toward monotheism.
Source: Names of God in Judaism
