Was “Yahweh” actually the personal name of the God of Israel? And how do we explain that the world-destroying flood of Genesis 6-9 (the story of Noah) comes in so many other versions from antiquity written long before the book of Genesis appeared?
I have been doing a thread on interesting features of the Hebrew Bible from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press). Here I address the two issues of God’s name and the flood, both of them accounts found in the second book of the Pentateuch, Exodus.
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BOX 4.1 THE PERSONAL NAME OF GOD
God is called by many names in the Bible, including Lord, God, Lord God, God Almighty, God the King, and Lord God of Hosts. But there is one term used for God that appears to have been thought of by ancient Israelites as his actual, personal name. In English, this is often given as Yahweh, based on the Hebrew word YHWH. Ancient Hebrew did not have vowels, only consonants, and so we do not actually know how the word was pronounced, although “Yahweh” is a good guess. Because this special name of God consists of four letters, it is sometimes referred to as the tetragrammaton (literally, “the four letters”).
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