The Name of YHWH (Gen 4:26)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²⁶ Then calling in the name of YHWH came into standard use.

 אָ֣ז הוּחַ֔ל לִקְרֹ֖א בְּשֵׁ֥ם יְ׳הוָֽה׃ פ

We’ve spoken before, most recently on Sunday, about the fact that different biblical voices use different names for the God of Israel. The standard scholarly assumption is that the priestly voice understands God’s name (called “the Tetragrammaton” because it is no longer pronounced but only spelled with the four Hebrew letters corresponding to YHWH) not to have been revealed until God speaks it to Moses in Exodus 6.

The compiler or composer of the Pentateuch, or at least the section of it we’ve been reading, clearly has been balancing his use of the names. Again, see Sunday’s post for more details; you’ll find earlier discussions of this subject here, here, and here. Now, at the end of the third episode of the Bible, we have a definitive statement about when the use of that name began: very close to the beginning of human history, rather than at the beginning of the new stage of human history that started with the creation of the Israelite nation and their freedom from Egyptian slavery.

As usual, there is also a lot to talk about simply in translating our verse: