Meaning

Alternative letter-case form of Tetragrammaton..

Example Sentences

One was to make Elohim the principal predicate,—Hear, O Israel: Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is one; the other was to give the two tetragrammatons different meanings, making one the proper name and the other the appellative, as if one should read, Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is the one Universe-Sustainer.

The fifty engravings were crowned with the forty-two sacred letters of the holy name⁴³³ with which heaven and earth were created, and eight gates were engraved with their engravings, and these are the eight letters of Mercy, as it is written “YHVH YHVH God, merciful and gracious” (Exodus 34: 6), which emerged from Atika Kadisha to Ze’ir and were united with these holy crowns, the supernal and exalted Ḥokhmah and Binah.⁴³⁴ […] ⁴³³ There are fifty engravings to match the fifty gates of Binah, namely, the forty-two-lettered name, which consists basically of the initial letters of the prayer ana ba-koaḥ, but which can also be represented by the first forty-two letters of Genesis, which form the name derived from the account of Creation, together with the eight letters of the two tetragrammata at the beginning of the thirteen attributes of Mercy.

Written vertically from top to bottom, the JHVH tetragrammaton stands for the human body, the image of God. The other three tetragrammatons are secondary, being ‘by-names’ of God, three of the 72 ‘explicatory names’ known as ‘Shem ha-mephorash’ or ‘Shemaham-phorash’.

Dahood, Psalms, 201, reads a tricolon based on reading עַל as a divine epithet paralleling the two tetragrammata.

In order to illustrate this, I shall address an interesting passage from Abulafia’s commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed, entitled H̲ayyei ha-Nefesh: / [a] But their issue⁴⁶ is YHWH—in the world of the angels, which are the first Hawayah according to the secret of necessity⁴⁷ YHWH—in the world of the spheres, which are the second Hawayah according to the secret of necessity, YHWH—in the lower world, which is the third Hawayah, the last according to the secret of necessity, in those according to their degree and in those according to their degree. […] 46 Namely of the three tetragrammata, which he mentions beforehand, where he refers to both the Talmud and to Maimonides’ Guide i, ch. 61.

Triangles enclosing tetragrammatons can also be found in the frontispieces of many non-religious works from the same period.

Word Forms

• tetragrammata
• tetragrammatons

Related Words

When Should You Use Tetragrammaton?

Use tetragrammaton when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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