Tourists in the Middle East are always regaled by the local guides with fanciful explanations of natural phenomena. One splendid example of this is as follows: “God has one hundred names: man knows only ninety-nine of them, but the camel knows the hundredth. That is why the camel always goes round with his nose in the air and a superior look on his face.”
    Well, that's as may be, but does God really have a hundred names? I suppose one could count The Lord, The Almighty, Providence, The All Merciful, The One Above and so on. But these are really descriptions and functions of the deity rather than actual names.
    So far as the children of Israel were concerned, God had only one name. expressed by four Hebrew characters transcribed into English as JHVH or YHWH, it being impossible to reproduce an exact equivalent in the two languages.
    How that word was pronounced poses further problems: the original Hebrew language contained no vowels – its alphabet consisted entirely of consonants, and the reader was expected to know the right vowels to insert when pronouncing them.
    As the only people who could read at all were the priests, the scribes and other highly educated men, this presented little difficulty; but later, as more people learned to read, it became necessary to offer some assistance in pronunciation.
    This the scribes achieved by adding various dots and dashes over or under the consonants to indicate how the word was to be spoken. Because the same scribes were producing a new commentary of the Scriptures called the “Massora”, this new version using consonants plus dots and dashes became known as the Massoretic Text.
    So we now have JHVH or YHWH with no vowels at all, so what pronunciation are we going to use? The straight answer is that we are not going to use any pronunciation at all. Under Jewish law it was strictly forbidden for anyone to pronounce the Sacred Name save only the High Priest, and then but once a year when he entered the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement.
    But the Scriptures are full of passages where our four consonants are used as God's Name, so how could readers include it without actually pronouncing it?
    They didn't. Every time those four consonants or “tetragrammaton” appeared in the text, the reader substituted “the LORD” and this convention has been followed right down the ages, and in our Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible.
    Every time JHVH appeared in the Hebrew our English translators printed LORD in capital letters – and still does.
    Now that's all right in translation. But how about the unfortunate Rabbi reading aloud in the Synagogue? How is he to remember to say LORD instead of JHVH when reading from the Hebrew Bible?
    The compilers of the Massoretic Text had a brilliant answer to this: wherever the tetragrammaton appeared they added to it the dots and dashes of the Hebrew word for Lord, which is ADONAI or EDONAY.
    The first letter was something between an “A” and an “E”, and the last letter “I” was a Hebrew consonant like our “V”. Therefore, the reader, seeing this combination, would automatically be reminded to say EDONAY instead of JHVH.
    Unfortunately, later translators failed to understand this convention, and ignorantly supposed that the dots and dashes did really belong to the tetragrammaton. So they inserted the vowels of EDONAY – E, O and A – into the consonants JHVH, and thus came up with what we now know as JEHOVAH.
    More modern scholars think that the original pronunciation might have been something like YAHWEH, but nobody knows for certain, the secret having died out with the last High Priest.
    The only thing of which we can be quite sure is that it was definitely not pronounced JEHOVAH, otherwise there would have been no point in the Massoretic substitution.
    The JHVH of the Hebrew seems to have been a combination of the various parts of the verb “to be”, the past, the present and the future. This indicated the continuing existence of God who “is what He was, was what He is, and evermore will be both what He was and what He is”, the eternal source of all life and thought, not only unpronounceable, but inexplicable and beyond man's understanding.
    By combining all this with the vowels of the Hebrew LORD, we have achieved, in the name JEHOVAH, the nearest approach to the perfect description, at once Almighty, All-Merciful, Providence, the lot!
    Each of these words convey some aspect of the Divine, and as men's minds are small, it is perhaps appropriate that we should think of God's connection with our own particular interests and concerns.
    So, I am sure that Masons cannot improve on their own favourite description of The Great Architect and Grand Geometrician of the Universe, to Whom we must all submit, and Whom we ought humbly to adore.

The Reverend Canon Richard Tydeman was awarded the Grand Master's Order of Service to Masonry in 1988 and promoted to Junior Grand Warden in 1989. In Royal Arch he was Grand Scribe Nehemiah in 1971 and Grand Superintendent in and over Suffolk 1980-1987. He holds high rank in many other Degrees and Orders.