Jehovah (I Am that I Am)
And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him,
I am the Lord: And I appeared unto Abraham,
unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of
God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah was
I not known to them.
-- Exodus 6: 2-3 (KJV) You may wonder, as
you read along in the Hebrew Bible, why God
has so many names. To the polite plural Elohim
("gods") of Genesis 1, Genesis
2 adds the "tetragrammaton" (four-letter
name) YHWH or YHVH, rendered as "the
Lord" in the Authorized Version. Later
we find other designations, such as Eloah
("God"), El Shaddai
("God of the Mountains"), El Elyon
("God Most High"), and so on.
The reason for this confusing plenitude is
that some of the Bible's authors have a problem
with the proper name YHWH, pronounced as
"Yahweh." J (the "Yahwist")
is not one of them, as he uses it consistently
from the start, and he tells us in Genesis
(4: 26) that men first called God YHWH in
the days of Seth, the third son of Adam and
Eve.
J is contradicted, however, in Exodus, where
God tells Moses that he "appeared unto
Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the
name of God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by
my name Jehovah [YHWH] was I not known to
them" (Exodus 6: 3). Perhaps God forgets
that Abraham "called upon the name of
the Lord [YHWH]" at Genesis 12: 8; that
Isaac "called upon the name of the Lord
[YHWH]" at Genesis 26: 25; and that
he himself (Genesis 28: 13) announced to
Jacob that "I am the Lord [YHWH] God
of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac."
If so, God has a mighty short memory.
The truth, however, is that P (the "Priestly
Author") wrote chapter 6 of Exodus,
and P (like the "Elohist," E) had
different ideas than J about the use of God's
proper name. So in Genesis he and E use Elohim
and El Shaddai and so forth, since according
to them God's name was unknown to men until
he revealed it to Moses.
I'm sure all that's now crystal clear, but
there remain the questions of what "Yahweh"
means and how it came to be Anglicized as
"Jehovah." Yahweh has already explained
to Moses, in a passage by E (Exodus 3: 14),
that his name means "I am that I am"
-- ehyeh asher ehyeh, an obscure statement
that might also be rendered "I will
be what I will be" or "I cause
that which is to be." (Yahweh probably
means both that he is a completely self-sufficient
being, and that he is the ultimate source
of all other beings.) Transposed into the
third person -- "he is who is"
or "he who causes what is to be"
-- God's statement would read Yahweh asher
yihweh, Q. E. D. The form YHWH itself is
the standard Hebrew spelling, which only
renders consonants.
As for the English spelling, we owe that
to William Tyndale's 1530 translation of
this passage, where "Jehovah" (old
spelling "Iehoua") replaces the
term "Adonai" ("My Great Lord"),
which is found in Wyclif's translation. Yet
does not entirely replace it: in fact, "Jehovah"
is compounded from the sacred consonants
YHVH and the vowels of Adonai.
This is where the plot really thickens. It
turns out that the "false" vowels
of Adonai had already been added to YHWH
in "pointed" versions of the original
Hebrew text, which, for purposes of reading
aloud, subscribed vowels to the consonants
as found in the original. But YHWH was marked
with the vowels of Adonai precisely in order
to remind readers to say "Adonai"
rather than utter the sacred name itself,
which was the subject of increasing awe and
superstition. (After about 300 B. C., Jews
almost entirely ceased pronouncing the name
"Yahweh.")
Tyndale was not the first to blunder in adding
false vowels to Yahweh's name, but he was
the first to do so in English. Not only did
he obscure the true pronunciation of the
divine name, his version is furthermore apt
to recall the pagan deity Jove, whose name
is not at all related to God's, but which
would occasionally serve as a euphemism among
reverential Englishmen. And because "Jehovah"
was mistaken as authentic, Tyndale and later
translators wished to avoid using it except
when absolutely necessary
-- which is why it is represented as "Lord"
in the King James text. It turns out, of
course, that they could have gone right ahead
and used "Jehovah."
As for "I am that I am" or whatever
the name means, Yahweh probably wouldn't
sanction most of the quotations in his honor,
since presumably human beings aren't "that
they are" -- that is, not the source
of their own being. But the narrator of Aldous
Huxley's story "After the Fireworks"
(in Brief Candles, 1930) mistakes Yahweh
to mean "I am what I am," which
is of course always literally true as it
is spoken. "They behave as they do,"
he opines, "because they can't help
it; that's what they happen to be like. 'I
am that I am'; Jehovah's is the last word
in realistic psychology."
On the other hand, if we take "I am
what I am" figuratively, it needn't
be true, as Iago realizes in Shakespeare's
Othello (1604). At one point he announces
to Roderigo that "I am not what I am"
(Act 1, scene 1), which means "I am
not as I appear" but also much more.
Iago is the closest we come in Shakespeare
to the devil.
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Evans Experientialism 
