tetragrammaton

noun

1. (Judaism)The word in four Hebrew letters יהוה (in transliteration as YHWH or JHVH) used as the ineffable name of God in the Hebrew Bible, variously rendered as Yahweh or Jehovah.

   “The starting point of this discussion was Origen’s much-debated comment to Psalm 2:2 concerning the Tetragrammaton in “ancient” Hebrew characters. A very approximate terminus a quo for this practice in LXX texts is the first century b. c. e., the date of the Cairo Papyrus Fouad 266, a revision of the Greek Torah from the second century b. c. e., in which the Tetragrammata are written in square Hebrew characters.”

   “The Tetragrammatons are written out in such a way that the names of single letters are inscribed.”

   “According to R. Nehemiah, the double Tetragrammaton is one of Metatron’s 70 names: In gematria the consonants YHWH WHYH amount to 52. The two Tetragrammata do not leave any doubt as to the divine nature of the entities referenced here.”

   “A few coins and medals with Tetragrammata are found from the Netherlands at the end of the 16th century, but most are from the 17th century, with examples from Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as proud towns in the Holy Roman Empire (Nuremberg, Hamburg, Magdeburg) and several from Saxony.”

2. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of Tetragrammaton.

   “One was to make Elohim the principal predicate,—Hear, O Israel: Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is one; the other was to give the two tetragrammatons different meanings, making one the proper name and the other the appellative, as if one should read, Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is the one Universe-Sustainer.”

   “Written vertically from top to bottom, the JHVH tetragrammaton stands for the human body, the image of God. The other three tetragrammatons are secondary, being ‘by-names’ of God, three of the 72 ‘explicatory names’ known as ‘Shem ha-mephorash’ or ‘Shemaham-phorash’.”

   “Dahood, Psalms, 201, reads a tricolon based on reading עַל as a divine epithet paralleling the two tetragrammata.”