A Public Service Announcement: It's Yaveh, Not Yahweh
You probably know the word "יהוה" or more likely its English equivalent "YHVH": It's the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter title of the Abrahamic God.
But it's more likely that you recognize it as "YHWH," with a W, or the pronounceable version "Yahweh." This is understood in American Christendom as one of the holiest names of said god, whom they classify in their Trinity as "God the Father."
And I wanted to give a small public service announcement: That third letter isn't a W. It is unambiguously a V-and to the best of our knowledge it always was, right back to the beginning. So if you've ever been using the W pronunciation, you've been it saying it wrong. (See endnotes.)
What I find so interesting about this is that you would be hard-pressed to draw this conclusion if you didn't already know it, because there is so much misinformation online. Indeed, if you tried to fact-check this yourself you would almost certainly come away with the decisive view that the correct sound is a W, and the V is a much more recent innovation.
Why? Well, two reasons. One is that the Internet is a way less reliable source than I would wish for it to be. But the other, and more relevant reason today is: Because that is the Christian narrative. (And it is also the Islamic narrative, though that narrative carries less far weight in the West.) Many contemporary Christians are weirdly fascinated with Judaism and Hebrew and Israel, seeing these things as exotic and mystical, and by extension believing them to be situated immediate to many profound divine truths. Many Christians therefore have the unsavory habit of appropriating Jewish symbols, language, etc. for themselves as a kind of bling that connotes authenticity and spiritualism.
And so you will see a great deal of Christian "expertise" about the Hebrew language, and Jewish history, and Israeli culture-including a neverending stream of very solemn, very self-righteous people who are adamant that the third letter in "יהוה" is pronounced with a W.
The letter in question, vav, is the sixth letter in the core Hebrew alphabet. It is depicted in this font, very badly, as ו, for there is actually a little hook at the top left, and the letter is always drawn with a curvy appearance. It is normally a consonant, making the V sound (and only ever the V sound); but, confusingly, it can also function as not one but TWO different vowels: a long O "oh" sound that rhymes with words like "so," and a long U "ooh" sound that rhymes with words like "soon."
I have, in my considerable exposure in the course of my life, never, ever met a Jew who pronounced the consonant vav with anything but a V sound. This includes both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions (Eastern European Jews and Moorish Jews, respectively), both in speech and in writing, across all three main branches of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform) and their subvariants to the extent I have interacted with them. It's a V, full stop. I never had any inkling that people might think otherwise until Christians started opening their mouths.
I continually see Christians, Muslims, and non-religious Westerners who are either ex-Christian or never had any religion (and thus are ethnically Christian by default, having been raised into the Christian paradigm and possessing its blind spots) interpret the sound as a W sound. And why shouldn't they? They are being introduced to that narrative in the context of having a blank slate. Why should they have any reason to believe that they're being lied to? (Or, more charitably, that they're being unintentionally misinformed?) Except for those who possess the wisdom of skepticism, generally speaking when one is told about the world in a seemingly factual sense one accepts those claims if there are no preexisting facts to counter them. So it is that the people who buy into this narrative become misinformed about something on which they were previously merely ignorant, all while believing themselves to have become better-informed and wiser. Truly, that is a sobering cautionary reminder to us all that we are all susceptible to this constantly.
One of the most interesting conversations I overheard on the bus this past year was between two strangers who were both students of ancient Hebrew-and neither of whom were religiously or ethnically Jewish. One was a scholar whose ultimate motives I never discerned and the other was one of these Christians who sees Hebrew as this exotic gateway to divine truths. And they talked at great length about "biblical" Hebrew and were genuinely interested in it. But they were also quite obviously wrong about more than a few points-and anyone with even a rudimentary experience in the Jewish tradition would have been able to point out their errors to them. It just goes to show the challenges and caveats that come with trying to learn about something from the outside.
Many Christians who believe in the W will tell you that Hebrew didn't originally possess the V sound. This is wrong, and in fact there is an entire other letter in the expanded Hebrew alphabet, vet, which makes a V sound. (It is based on the letter bet, which makes a B sound.) If one of these Christians manages to know about the existence of vet, they'll usually get its usage rules wrong: I've heard them say that vet only comes at the end of words (flat-out wrong, and indeed the Hebrew word "yeshiva" i.e. Jewish university has a vet in it: It is based on the word "shevat," which looks identical to the word "shabbat" except for the presence or absence of the little dot in the middle called a dagesh); or that vet never comes at the beginning of words (also wrong; vet is sometimes used at the start of words preceded by words ending in a vowel). But, to the point, Hebrew has always had the V phoneme, for millennia.
Many Christians who nevertheless know that vet exists will still insist that vav was originally "wau" (or "waw"), and only took on the V sound because of the Ashkenazic passage through the Germanic languages. And while this isn't completely wrong on a situational basis, it is wrong in the overarching sense, and this has been known at least as far back as the 19th century, when scholars surveyed Jews around the world and found, among other things, that nearly all of them pronounced vav with a V sound.
Those who didn't, who actually did use the W sound, were a small minority, and all of them were in geographically Arabic regions. Arabic also has its own version of this letter, and its pronunciation is W. So it wasn't that Jews all around the world switched from W to V because of a phenomenon in Europe-which is quite a bold claim if you think about. It was the exact other way around: Jews in the Arabic world switched from V to W because of a Middle Eastern phenomenon. And not all of them did! In fact, most of them didn't. Many Jews in this region kept the V sound even when they spoke both languages and pronounced this word with a W outside their synagogues and Hebrew speech.
Mind-bogglingly, some Christians-and no few Muslims who bother to weigh in on the topic-in attempting to assert the primacy of the W sound, will invoke this Islamic tradition as evidence in their favor...somehow completely forgetting that Judaism and Hebrew are THOUSANDS of years older than Islam and Arabic.
Now, I can imagine what you might be thinking: "Why does it matter? Who cares?" In truth, it doesn't matter in and of itself all that much, and certainly not to me. I'm not religious; I'm not gonna rake you over the coals for pronouncing "Yaveh" as "Yaweh." It's silly anyway: Jews pronounce "יהוה" as "Adonai," substituting a phonetic representation with yet another title of their god, basically meaning "Lord," or as "Hashem," which basically means "The Name." Only Christians are concerned with the phonetic pronunciation.
But it does matter, I think, for a few meta reasons:
First of all, if one is interested in the truth of things, and in accurate historical knowledge-which is what these Christians who appropriate Jewish symbols purport to be-then it's worth trying to be accurate. There is direct evidence (albeit limited) at least as far back as 1500 years ago to corroborate that vav had a V sound in Hebrew, in the form of the rhyming schemes used in old poetry, where the vav was presented as phonetically equivalent to the letter vet in some instances. And there is indirect evidence going back farther than that, though I do acknowledge that it becomes increasingly difficult to know what languages actually sounded like farther in the past-and I certainly grant that I am not an expert in this. And lastly I can point to a fairly plausible reason for how the W interpretation came into being: Remember how I said that the letter vav can also function as two different vowels? Both of those vowels, "oh" and "ooh," form the W sound at their end if you don't immediately cut into a consonant. That's possibly how the Arabic vav became a wau, and is very likely a factor in why the modern Christian narrative about vav is wrong.
Second of all, to the extent that grammatical prescriptivism can be invoked as a valid tool of precision and discernment and, more tenuously, of comprehensibility, we should make the effort to distinguish between V and W. (I say that the the comprehensibility argument is more tenuous than the precision and discernment arguments because in writing people will usually understand what you mean regardless of whether you use "Yaweh" or "Yaveh," at least in writing, but in speech "Yaveh" will often confuse people unless there is strong context present, which gives the prescriptivist argument for comprehensibility at least some strength.) Authoritarian grammatical prescriptivism is preposterous, but no prescriptivism at all is also preposterous, as it descends into chaos as people develop their own pronunciations for everything. While it is true that if enough people consistently pronounce something incorrectly the mispronunciation eventually becomes correct, and thus true that "Yaweh" and "vav-as-wau" are no longer strictly wrong by virtue of the fact that so many different people get it wrong in the same way and therefore understand each other despite being wrong, it is nevertheless also true that these corruptions often end up unintentionally obscuring deeper meanings and precision. This is one of the most natural ways that language evolves, but it comes at a price.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, this is a form of cultural appropriation and erasure by the oblivious Christian majority upon the Jewish minority. While the Christian convention isn't likely to hurt Jews who already know better, it can and does introduce strife into Jewish communities when people who use the wrong pronunciation convert to Judaism and end up either having to relearn their pronunciations or actually do end up corrupting the usages in that synagogue. And more importantly I think we can agree that it's wrong for a bigger culture to obliviously stomp on a smaller one. If you're a Christian and you exoticize Judaism, fine, whatever, but at least try and get it right...ya know?
Hence the public service announcement: It's V, not W.
But it's more likely that you recognize it as "YHWH," with a W, or the pronounceable version "Yahweh." This is understood in American Christendom as one of the holiest names of said god, whom they classify in their Trinity as "God the Father."
And I wanted to give a small public service announcement: That third letter isn't a W. It is unambiguously a V-and to the best of our knowledge it always was, right back to the beginning. So if you've ever been using the W pronunciation, you've been it saying it wrong. (See endnotes.)
What I find so interesting about this is that you would be hard-pressed to draw this conclusion if you didn't already know it, because there is so much misinformation online. Indeed, if you tried to fact-check this yourself you would almost certainly come away with the decisive view that the correct sound is a W, and the V is a much more recent innovation.
Why? Well, two reasons. One is that the Internet is a way less reliable source than I would wish for it to be. But the other, and more relevant reason today is: Because that is the Christian narrative. (And it is also the Islamic narrative, though that narrative carries less far weight in the West.) Many contemporary Christians are weirdly fascinated with Judaism and Hebrew and Israel, seeing these things as exotic and mystical, and by extension believing them to be situated immediate to many profound divine truths. Many Christians therefore have the unsavory habit of appropriating Jewish symbols, language, etc. for themselves as a kind of bling that connotes authenticity and spiritualism.
And so you will see a great deal of Christian "expertise" about the Hebrew language, and Jewish history, and Israeli culture-including a neverending stream of very solemn, very self-righteous people who are adamant that the third letter in "יהוה" is pronounced with a W.
The letter in question, vav, is the sixth letter in the core Hebrew alphabet. It is depicted in this font, very badly, as ו, for there is actually a little hook at the top left, and the letter is always drawn with a curvy appearance. It is normally a consonant, making the V sound (and only ever the V sound); but, confusingly, it can also function as not one but TWO different vowels: a long O "oh" sound that rhymes with words like "so," and a long U "ooh" sound that rhymes with words like "soon."
I have, in my considerable exposure in the course of my life, never, ever met a Jew who pronounced the consonant vav with anything but a V sound. This includes both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions (Eastern European Jews and Moorish Jews, respectively), both in speech and in writing, across all three main branches of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform) and their subvariants to the extent I have interacted with them. It's a V, full stop. I never had any inkling that people might think otherwise until Christians started opening their mouths.
I continually see Christians, Muslims, and non-religious Westerners who are either ex-Christian or never had any religion (and thus are ethnically Christian by default, having been raised into the Christian paradigm and possessing its blind spots) interpret the sound as a W sound. And why shouldn't they? They are being introduced to that narrative in the context of having a blank slate. Why should they have any reason to believe that they're being lied to? (Or, more charitably, that they're being unintentionally misinformed?) Except for those who possess the wisdom of skepticism, generally speaking when one is told about the world in a seemingly factual sense one accepts those claims if there are no preexisting facts to counter them. So it is that the people who buy into this narrative become misinformed about something on which they were previously merely ignorant, all while believing themselves to have become better-informed and wiser. Truly, that is a sobering cautionary reminder to us all that we are all susceptible to this constantly.
One of the most interesting conversations I overheard on the bus this past year was between two strangers who were both students of ancient Hebrew-and neither of whom were religiously or ethnically Jewish. One was a scholar whose ultimate motives I never discerned and the other was one of these Christians who sees Hebrew as this exotic gateway to divine truths. And they talked at great length about "biblical" Hebrew and were genuinely interested in it. But they were also quite obviously wrong about more than a few points-and anyone with even a rudimentary experience in the Jewish tradition would have been able to point out their errors to them. It just goes to show the challenges and caveats that come with trying to learn about something from the outside.
Many Christians who believe in the W will tell you that Hebrew didn't originally possess the V sound. This is wrong, and in fact there is an entire other letter in the expanded Hebrew alphabet, vet, which makes a V sound. (It is based on the letter bet, which makes a B sound.) If one of these Christians manages to know about the existence of vet, they'll usually get its usage rules wrong: I've heard them say that vet only comes at the end of words (flat-out wrong, and indeed the Hebrew word "yeshiva" i.e. Jewish university has a vet in it: It is based on the word "shevat," which looks identical to the word "shabbat" except for the presence or absence of the little dot in the middle called a dagesh); or that vet never comes at the beginning of words (also wrong; vet is sometimes used at the start of words preceded by words ending in a vowel). But, to the point, Hebrew has always had the V phoneme, for millennia.
Many Christians who nevertheless know that vet exists will still insist that vav was originally "wau" (or "waw"), and only took on the V sound because of the Ashkenazic passage through the Germanic languages. And while this isn't completely wrong on a situational basis, it is wrong in the overarching sense, and this has been known at least as far back as the 19th century, when scholars surveyed Jews around the world and found, among other things, that nearly all of them pronounced vav with a V sound.
Those who didn't, who actually did use the W sound, were a small minority, and all of them were in geographically Arabic regions. Arabic also has its own version of this letter, and its pronunciation is W. So it wasn't that Jews all around the world switched from W to V because of a phenomenon in Europe-which is quite a bold claim if you think about. It was the exact other way around: Jews in the Arabic world switched from V to W because of a Middle Eastern phenomenon. And not all of them did! In fact, most of them didn't. Many Jews in this region kept the V sound even when they spoke both languages and pronounced this word with a W outside their synagogues and Hebrew speech.
Mind-bogglingly, some Christians-and no few Muslims who bother to weigh in on the topic-in attempting to assert the primacy of the W sound, will invoke this Islamic tradition as evidence in their favor...somehow completely forgetting that Judaism and Hebrew are THOUSANDS of years older than Islam and Arabic.
Now, I can imagine what you might be thinking: "Why does it matter? Who cares?" In truth, it doesn't matter in and of itself all that much, and certainly not to me. I'm not religious; I'm not gonna rake you over the coals for pronouncing "Yaveh" as "Yaweh." It's silly anyway: Jews pronounce "יהוה" as "Adonai," substituting a phonetic representation with yet another title of their god, basically meaning "Lord," or as "Hashem," which basically means "The Name." Only Christians are concerned with the phonetic pronunciation.
But it does matter, I think, for a few meta reasons:
First of all, if one is interested in the truth of things, and in accurate historical knowledge-which is what these Christians who appropriate Jewish symbols purport to be-then it's worth trying to be accurate. There is direct evidence (albeit limited) at least as far back as 1500 years ago to corroborate that vav had a V sound in Hebrew, in the form of the rhyming schemes used in old poetry, where the vav was presented as phonetically equivalent to the letter vet in some instances. And there is indirect evidence going back farther than that, though I do acknowledge that it becomes increasingly difficult to know what languages actually sounded like farther in the past-and I certainly grant that I am not an expert in this. And lastly I can point to a fairly plausible reason for how the W interpretation came into being: Remember how I said that the letter vav can also function as two different vowels? Both of those vowels, "oh" and "ooh," form the W sound at their end if you don't immediately cut into a consonant. That's possibly how the Arabic vav became a wau, and is very likely a factor in why the modern Christian narrative about vav is wrong.
Second of all, to the extent that grammatical prescriptivism can be invoked as a valid tool of precision and discernment and, more tenuously, of comprehensibility, we should make the effort to distinguish between V and W. (I say that the the comprehensibility argument is more tenuous than the precision and discernment arguments because in writing people will usually understand what you mean regardless of whether you use "Yaweh" or "Yaveh," at least in writing, but in speech "Yaveh" will often confuse people unless there is strong context present, which gives the prescriptivist argument for comprehensibility at least some strength.) Authoritarian grammatical prescriptivism is preposterous, but no prescriptivism at all is also preposterous, as it descends into chaos as people develop their own pronunciations for everything. While it is true that if enough people consistently pronounce something incorrectly the mispronunciation eventually becomes correct, and thus true that "Yaweh" and "vav-as-wau" are no longer strictly wrong by virtue of the fact that so many different people get it wrong in the same way and therefore understand each other despite being wrong, it is nevertheless also true that these corruptions often end up unintentionally obscuring deeper meanings and precision. This is one of the most natural ways that language evolves, but it comes at a price.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, this is a form of cultural appropriation and erasure by the oblivious Christian majority upon the Jewish minority. While the Christian convention isn't likely to hurt Jews who already know better, it can and does introduce strife into Jewish communities when people who use the wrong pronunciation convert to Judaism and end up either having to relearn their pronunciations or actually do end up corrupting the usages in that synagogue. And more importantly I think we can agree that it's wrong for a bigger culture to obliviously stomp on a smaller one. If you're a Christian and you exoticize Judaism, fine, whatever, but at least try and get it right...ya know?
Hence the public service announcement: It's V, not W.