YHWH
I read a lot and studied - and I take Judaism seriously.Updated Jan 9
None of them.
Your question relies on a misunderstanding of how Hebrew works.
The four letter name of God - often transliterated into English as ‘yhwh’ is, in Hebrew, four letters.
All the letters are consonants, because in Hebrew, all letters are consonants - vowel sounds are not, typically, letters in Hebrew and never appear.
That said, the word represented by ‘yhwh’ can, in normal Hebrew, be rendered in more than one way in Hebrew, depending on how you pronounce it - that is, which vowels you use and where.
ONE of the ways you MIGHT legitimately pronounce that word ends up as a single word which could mean ‘I am’ (in the sense of ‘I exist’).
It could also be rendered as ‘I was’ or even as ‘I will be’.
All of those are single words in Hebrew, because that is how Hebrew works.
Hebrew works on a system of tri-literal (three letter) roots which ‘build’ into words of different meanings through prefixes, suffixes and changes in the vowels.
The ‘root’ of yhwh is the ‘hwh’ letters, which - at root, so to speak - mean ‘beingness, existence’.
Bottom line, absolutely NOBODY knows what the four letter name ‘means’ except that it is the Name of God. Grammatically, it is a verb. That’s important (most names are not verbs).
So the translation ‘I am that I am’ or ‘I am, was, and will be’ - those are all simply different readings, none of them any better than any other.
But none of the letters ‘stand for’ some other word. It isn’t an acronym, and it isn’t a phrase. In Hebrew, yhwh is ONE word, a verb, and the root of it is ‘exist, being’ - the verb ‘to be’ (in English). That it is first person singular is simply the grammatical form. (I am reminded - it is third person singular - probably. It’s a verb - already an odd thing for a ‘name’.)
The way Biblical Hebrew handles time is not the way English handles time. English divides time into ‘past, present and future’, but Biblical Hebrew divides time into the ideas of ‘past action completed and over with’ (perfect), and ‘actions not completed and over with’(imperfect) - which can include past, present AND future.
Grammatically, yhwh is -
singular, action not completed and over with’ and the root meaning is ‘exist, being’ - the verb ‘to be’.
So the word yhwh has something to do with existence and beingness, and that existence and beingness is not something over and done with, but exists ‘now’ and presumably existed ‘before now’ and also is going to exist ‘after now’ - always bearing in mind that, without knowing how the vowel sounds should apply, we don’t actually know if we are quite exactly right - or not. However, there are not infinite possibilities, so we have a low number of possibilities.
So - do you kind of see how a translator might end up with ‘I am that I am’?
It is not, I think, a particularly GOOD translation, but seriously, there really IS no particularly good translation into English to be had.
Too many people who speak only one language think every language works the same as the one they know, and all you have to do is plug in the appropriate word for the other word, and bingo, translated.
Sorry. That isn’t how anything actually works, unless the languages are very, very closely related - and even then, there are differences. German and English are reasonably close, but in German I live in a street, not on it, and the idiomatic expressions are totally different.
Hebrew and English are not closely related.
Edit to add this comment from a reader:
Could I add that some scholars argue that the tetragrammaton reflects the causative form of the Hebrew verb “to become” and, therefore, believe it should be translated as “he causes to become.” This would seem to fit quite well with God's being the creator of all things and fulfiller of his purpose.