Names of God in the Bible and Their Meanings: Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai

Names and Their Biblical MeaningsSee all 223 articles in this series

God has one personal name in the Hebrew Bible, the four letters YHWH, and many titles. Scholars reconstruct the name as Yahweh, most English Bibles print it LORD, and it is most often explained as “the one who is”. Elohim, “God”, and Adonai, “Lord”, are the commonest titles; El Shaddai, “God Almighty”, and several others first appear in Abraham’s story.

Many of the Old Testament’s names for God join El, “God”, or YHWH to a second word that says something about him. In the table the Hebrew is given as it is written, from right to left.

Name	Hebrew	Meaning	First appears
YHWH (Yahweh)	יהוה	the one who is; printed LORD	Genesis 2:4
Elohim	אֱלֹהִים	God	Genesis 1:1
El	אֵל	God	Genesis 14:18
Adonai	אֲדֹנָי	my Lord, the Lord	Genesis 15:2
El Elyon	אֵל עֶלְיוֹן	God Most High	Genesis 14:18
El Roi	אֵל רֳאִי	God who sees	Genesis 16:13
El Shaddai	אֵל שַׁדַּי	God Almighty (origin uncertain)	Genesis 17:1
El Olam	אֵל עוֹלָם	the everlasting God	Genesis 21:33
Ehyeh asher ehyeh	אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה	I am that I am	Exodus 3:14
Yah	יָהּ	short form of YHWH, as in hallelujah	Exodus 15:2
El Qanna	אֵל קַנָּא	a jealous God	Exodus 20:5
YHWH Tsevaot (Sabaoth)	יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת	the LORD of hosts	1 Samuel 1:3
Attiq Yomin (Aramaic)	עַתִּיק יוֹמִין	the Ancient of Days	Daniel 7:9

Elohim is plural in form, yet when it names the God of Israel it takes a singular verb: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 explains it as a plural of majesty, “expressing high dignity or greatness”. The same word can also mean gods, angels or human judges, so we learn which is meant from the sentence around it. El is the shorter word for God, and Hebrew shares it with the other Semitic languages. The Bible uses it chiefly in poetry and prophecy, often on its own, while in prose it usually comes joined to a second word.

The names first spoken in Abraham’s story

Six of these names first appear in Abraham’s story, between Genesis 14 and Genesis 21. The first comes with Melchizedek, king of Salem, who was “the priest of the most high God” (Genesis 14:18). In Hebrew that is El Elyon, the first time the Bible uses El, and Melchizedek blessed Abram in that name (Genesis 14:19). Adonai is first used for God when Abram asks, “Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless” (Genesis 15:2). Hagar, Sarai’s Egyptian handmaid, met the angel of the LORD “by a fountain of water in the wilderness” and named the God who spoke to her: “Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:7, 16:13). In Hebrew that is El Roi, “God of seeing”.

When Abram was ninety-nine, God named himself: “I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect” (Genesis 17:1). Later, at Beersheba, Abraham “called there on the name of the LORD, the everlasting God” (Genesis 21:33), El Olam.

What does Shaddai mean?

Nobody knows for certain what Shaddai means, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon of 1906 calls its etymology “dubious”. It records an old rabbinic reading, “self-sufficient”, held by “no moderns”, and the guesses of its own day: a link with a verb meaning to overpower, or with an Assyrian word for mountain. The ancient Greek translators sometimes wrote pantokrator, which Thayer’s lexicon defines as “he who holds sway over all things; the ruler of all; almighty”, and the Latin Bible mostly wrote omnipotens. English Bibles followed them when they wrote “Almighty”.

God explained his name to Moses at the burning bush. Moses asked what he should tell the people when they asked God’s name, and God answered: “I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14). The next verse gives the four letters themselves and adds, “this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3:15). The Jewish Encyclopedia counts 6,823 uses of the name in the Old Testament, more than any other name for God.

In form YHWH looks like the Hebrew verb “to be”, and the Jewish Encyclopedia reads it as “He is” or “He will be”. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon of 1906 reports that most scholars take it as “the one who is”, while “Many recent scholars” read it as “the one bringing into being, life-giver”. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives three English renderings, “I AM HE WHO IS”, “I AM WHO AM” or “I AM WHO I AM”, and calls the name “at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name”. There is another reading, which the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon sets out, that looks back to verse 12, where God has just told Moses, “Certainly I will be with thee” (Exodus 3:12). Read that way, the name is a promise: I will be with you.

Most English Bibles print LORD because Jewish readers do not pronounce the name, and Christian translators kept their custom. In printed Hebrew Bibles the four letters carry the vowels of Adonai, a sign to say “Lord” in its place. The Talmud names each word by its first two letters, yod-he for YHWH and alef-daleth for Adonai: in this world God’s name “is written with a yod he and read as alef daleth; but in the future world it shall all be one: it shall be written with yod he and read as yod he” (Pesachim 50a).

The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, wrote Kyrios, “Lord”, for the name, and the New Testament follows it. English Bibles, though, keep the two words apart with capitals. The translators of the English Standard Version explain that, “As is common among English translations today”, they print YHWH as LORD in small capitals, Adonai as “Lord”, and the two together as “Lord GOD”, the form already found in the King James Version of Genesis 15:2.

Without them one verse would be hard to follow. Psalm 110 opens, “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Psalm 110:1): YHWH speaks to someone the psalmist calls “my Lord”. Jesus quoted the verse and asked, “How then doth David in spirit call him Lord” (Matthew 22:43).

Where does the name Jehovah come from?

Jehovah is the four letters of YHWH read with the vowels meant for Adonai. The preface to the English Standard Version puts it plainly: “When the vowels of the word ’adonay are placed with the consonants of YHWH, this results in the familiar word Jehovah”. The Jewish Encyclopedia calls the form “a comparatively recent invention” and finds it in a Latin work of 1270, Raymond Martin’s Pugio Fidei. Peter Galatin, a Christian scholar, used it in 1518, and others followed him. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who use the name, give their reason: “Jehovah is a rendering of God’s name in English that has been used for centuries. While many scholars prefer the spelling ‘Yahweh,’ Jehovah is the form of the name that is most widely recognized.”

The King James Version prints Jehovah seven times: four times on its own (Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, Isaiah 12:2 and Isaiah 26:4) and three times in place names, Jehovahjireh, Jehovahnissi and Jehovahshalom. Scholars reconstruct the original sound as Yahweh, helped by early Greek spellings such as Iabe, but the translators of the ESV add that “The exact pronunciation of YHWH is uncertain”.

These eight phrases, often listed as the Jehovah names, join YHWH to a second word. The King James Version spells three of them as names, Jehovahjireh, Jehovahnissi and Jehovahshalom, and translates the rest.

Name	Hebrew	Meaning	Verse
Jehovah Jireh	יְהוָה יִרְאֶה	the LORD will see to it, will provide	Genesis 22:14
Jehovah Rapha	יְהוָה רֹפְאֶךָ	the LORD who heals you	Exodus 15:26
Jehovah Nissi	יְהוָה נִסִּי	the LORD is my banner	Exodus 17:15
Jehovah Mekaddishkem	יְהוָה מְקַדִּשְׁכֶם	the LORD who makes you holy	Exodus 31:13
Jehovah Shalom	יְהוָה שָׁלוֹם	the LORD is peace	Judges 6:24
Jehovah Ro’i	יְהוָה רֹעִי	the LORD is my shepherd	Psalm 23:1
Jehovah Tsidkenu	יְהוָה צִדְקֵנוּ	the LORD our righteousness	Jeremiah 23:6
Jehovah Shammah	יְהוָה שָׁמָּה	the LORD is there	Ezekiel 48:35

Five of the eight are names given to something in the story. Abraham named the mountain where he found “a ram caught in a thicket by his horns” and offered it “in the stead of his son” (Genesis 22:13–14). Moses named the altar he built after Joshua defeated Amalek (Exodus 17:13–15), and Gideon the altar at Ophrah (Judges 6:24). Jeremiah’s phrase is the name of the king God would raise up for David, “a righteous Branch” (Jeremiah 23:5–6), and Ezekiel’s is the name of the city in his vision (Ezekiel 48:35).

The other three come from sentences in which God speaks of himself. At Marah, after the bitter water was made sweet, God told Israel, “I am the LORD that healeth thee” (Exodus 15:26). The sabbath law ends, “that ye may know that I am the LORD that doth sanctify you” (Exodus 31:13), and Psalm 23 begins, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Lists of God’s names put these three into the same form as the others, and call them Jehovah Rapha, Jehovah Mekaddishkem and Jehovah Ro’i.

Jews have avoided saying the name since at least the third century before Christ, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia. Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok gives the reason: by then its letters “were regarded as so sacred that they were never articulated”. While the Temple stood, the priests still spoke the name in the priestly blessing, and the high priest on the Day of Atonement. In prayer Jews say Adonai, and in ordinary speech, she writes, “today most Orthodox Jews use [the term] HaShem, which simply means ‘the Name’”. Among the strictly traditional, even the English word God is not written in full, a care she ties to the commandment against taking God’s name in vain (Exodus 20:7).

The Catholic Church keeps the same custom as the Jews, and its Catechism records that “Out of respect for the holiness of God, the people of Israel do not pronounce his name” and that in reading Scripture the name is replaced by “LORD”. Christians do sometimes say Yahweh: in 2008 the Vatican’s office for worship noted that “in recent years the practice has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel’s proper name” in readings, prayers and hymns. It directed that “In liturgical celebrations, in songs and prayers the name of God in the form of the tetragrammaton YHWH is neither to be used or pronounced.” In Catholic worship the name is read as “Lord”. Orthodox icons carry the name in another form: the halo of Christ bears letters for the name given to Moses, “He Who Is”. Most English Bibles read by Protestants print LORD, the practice the ESV’s translators call common among English translations.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, do use the name, and they teach that “God has just one personal name”, written יהוה and “usually rendered ‘Jehovah’ in English”, and that God honours his worshippers “by inviting them to address him by his personal name”.

The New Testament was written in Greek, and its usual word for God is Theos, which appears more than 1,300 times. Kyrios, “Lord”, stands in for YHWH, because the Greek Old Testament had used it for the name, and the first Christians gave it to Jesus: “every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11). The Catechism connects the two: “It is under this title that the divinity of Jesus will be acclaimed”.

Jesus taught his followers to call God Father: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9). He also used the Aramaic word Abba, which Thayer’s lexicon calls “a customary title of God in prayer”. Each of its three appearances is followed at once by the Greek for Father: Jesus’s “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee” (Mark 14:36), and Paul’s “we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15) and “crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6).

In John’s Gospel Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), and elsewhere, “When ye have lifted up the Son of man, then shall ye know that I am he” (John 8:28). The Catechism quotes the second saying with “I AM” and says that by giving his life Jesus “reveals that he himself bears the divine name”. Revelation echoes the old names in one sentence: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8). Its word for “the Almighty” is pantokrator, which the Septuagint used for “of hosts” and sometimes for Shaddai. When Jesus sent his followers to all nations, he told them to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19), a single name for all three.

Many more titles belong to the Son and the Holy Spirit:

• Jesus, the name given because “he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21)
• Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23)
• Christ, from the Greek Christos, which, in the words of the English Standard Version’s preface, “originally meant simply ‘anointed’”
• the Son of man, Jesus’s own title: “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” (Matthew 16:13)
• the Lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5)
• the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, two English names for the same Person (Matthew 28:19, Luke 11:13)

There is no fixed number, because it depends on what we count as a name. The rabbis, the Jewish Encyclopedia says, “recognized only one proper name for the Deity” and counted the others as titles, and Jehovah’s Witnesses say the same of Jehovah. Lists of a hundred or more names gather titles from across Scripture, such as Rock, Shepherd and Ancient of Days. You will often meet three numbers, seven, 72 and 99, and each comes from a different tradition.

The seven names

Jewish law counts seven names that a scribe copying Scripture must treat as holy: El, Elohim, Adonai, YHWH, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Shaddai and Tsevaot. If he makes a mistake while writing one of them, he may not erase it, and the Jewish Encyclopedia records that “the whole page must be put in a genizah and a new page begun”.

The 72 names

The 72 names come from the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah. Exodus 14:19–21 are three verses of 72 Hebrew letters each; read in a set order, a letter from each verse at a time, they give 72 names of three letters. The commentator Rashi mentions the scheme in his notes on the Talmud. No verse of the Bible lists the 72.

The 99 names

The 99 names belong to Islam, and a saying of Muhammad in the collection of al-Bukhari reads: “Allah has ninety-nine names, i.e. one-hundred minus one, and whoever knows them will go to Paradise.” Christianity has no list like it, and how the God of the Qur’an relates to the God of the Bible is a question of its own: is Allah the same as Yahweh?

In the Bible a name stands for the person who bears it. The Catechism says, “A name expresses a person’s essence and identity and the meaning of this person’s life”, and the Jewish Encyclopedia notes that God’s name “is often spoken of as equivalent to the divine presence or power or glory”. So “The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe” (Proverbs 18:10).

To come “in the name of the Lord”, as the crowds said of Jesus (Matthew 21:9, from Psalm 118:26), is to come with God’s authority. To baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is to bring a person under that name. The same weight lies behind the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exodus 20:7), which is the verse behind the common question is saying “Oh my God” a sin? And when Jesus taught us to pray, the name came first: “Hallowed be thy name.”

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• Who is God in Christianity? The one Creator, Father, Son and Holy Spirit
• What the Bible says about the Holy Trinity
• The Torah and the Bible: how they differ
• Bible verses about God as our Father
• Who is the Holy Spirit?
• What Jehovah’s Witnesses believe about God

More from this seriesNames and Their Biblical MeaningsSee all 223 articles