The original pronunciation of Yahweh's name was lost after 70 CE
Yahweh began as a storm-and-war god of the ancient Levant who shared the stage with El, Asherah and Baal. Over centuries he became the one creator worshipped in Judaism, and his name grew so sacred that people stopped saying it. By the time Rome destroyed the Second Temple, nobody remembered how it sounded.
Yahweh emerges as the national god of two Iron Age kingdoms, Israel-Samaria and Judah, with worship reaching back at least to the early Iron Age and apparently into the late Bronze Age. Where he came from is fiercely disputed; there is almost no agreement, though most modern scholars lean towards a southern origin. The oldest biblical texts give him the powers of a weather and war deity who makes the land fertile and leads a heavenly army.
Many scholars think early Israelite religion grew out of Canaanite religion and was polytheistic. Yahweh seems to have merged with El over time, taking over as head of the pantheon, and El's consort Asherah became linked to him. Only later, as Yahwism developed into Judaism and Samaritanism, were other gods denied outright and Yahweh proclaimed sole creator.
The name was written with four consonants, YHWH, known as the Tetragrammaton, and scholars now agree to render it Yahweh. Short forms survive in names like Joel, Isaiah and Joshua and in the cry Hallelujah. Reverence for the name and the commandment against using it in vain led to ever stricter rules. Rabbinic sources suggest that in the Second Temple period only the High Priest spoke it, once a year on the Day of Atonement, while others substituted words such as adonay, meaning my lords.
Its meaning is equally unsettled. The Exodus explanation, I Am that I Am, may be a late theological gloss, though some scholars dispute that. Theodor Lewis links the name to an Amorite element meaning brings to life, found in Mari texts. Frank Moore Cross proposed a shortened cultic title of El, but that phrase is attested nowhere. Gérard Nissim Amzallag of Ben-Gurion University argues Yahweh was first a fire god tied to volcanoes and metalworking.
Source: Yahweh
