A dossier on the hybrid vocalization

Yehovah

How a scribal instruction to say one word became, read on its own, the name of another.

יהוה

YHWH — consonants only

What was written. The Tetragrammaton as it stands in an unpointed Hebrew consonantal text: four letters, no vowels supplied. This is the form underneath every version below.

Ketiv and Qere

Two different things sit on top of one another in יְהֹוָה — and the whole question of "Yehovah" comes down to whether you read them as one thing or two.

By the middle of the first millennium CE, Hebrew had largely ceased to be a spoken vernacular, and Jewish scribes called the Masoretes set about fixing its pronunciation in writing for the first time, adding a system of vowel points to a consonantal text that had stood, unpointed, for centuries.

Long before that project began, however, the custom of not pronouncing the divine name aloud during the Second Temple period was already well established. Where the Tetragrammaton, יהוה, appeared in the text, the reader said Adonai, "my Lord," instead.

The Masoretes preserved that substitution mechanically. Their device is called ketiv-qere — "what is written" against "what is said." They left the four consonants of the divine name in place on the page, but wrote beneath them the vowel points belonging to the word the reader was meant to say aloud: Adonai.

Superimposed on YHWH, those borrowed vowels produce the hybrid spelling יְהֹוָה. It was never intended to be sounded out as its own word. It was a note to the reader, written directly onto the consonants it applied to.

Attestation ledger

Three tiers of claim, kept separate rather than blended — following this site's standing rule that what is documented, what is inherited practice, and what is later synthesis are not the same kind of fact.

Attested

What the manuscripts show

The oldest complete Masoretic codices with Tiberian pointing — the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices, 10th–11th century — mostly write the divine name with no point at all under the first heh, a detail inconsistent with treating יְהֹוָה as a genuine word to be sounded.
The scholarly consensus is that the name's original vocalization, current before the Second Temple custom of avoidance took hold, was closer to Yahweh.
The transliteration Yehowah is attested in the 12th century CE as a reading of the hybrid pointed form; the Latinized Iehouah / Jehovah first appears in print in the 16th century.

Tradition

Living practice

Rabbinic and most Christian liturgical practice has, for two millennia, read Adonai (or ha-Shem, "the Name") wherever the Tetragrammaton occurs, treating the written name as a graphic sign not meant to be voiced.
Sacred Name and Hebrew Roots communities, along with earlier translators such as those behind the American Standard Version, have instead voiced the pointed form as written, giving currency to Jehovah and, in some circles, the more literally transliterated Yehovah.

Synthesis

Reading this site takes

"Yehovah" is best understood as a name with a documented paper trail rather than a documented pronunciation: it names how a reading instruction was voiced when someone chose to voice it, not what a First Temple worshiper said.
That does not make it a modern invention — the hybrid spelling is centuries old and the choice to read it aloud, rather than substitute Adonai, is itself a real and long-standing tradition, just a later one than the name it points to.

Timeline

Before c. 200 BCE

A name in circulation

The Tetragrammaton is written and, on the evidence of transliterations into Greek and other early sources, spoken. Scholars generally reconstruct this earlier pronunciation as close to Yahweh.

3rd–2nd century BCE onward

Avoidance takes hold

Second Temple Jewish practice moves toward not pronouncing the name aloud; Adonai is substituted in reading, and the original pronunciation gradually falls out of common use.

c. 600–1000 CE

The Masoretes point the text

Working to preserve a pronunciation tradition for a text whose vernacular use was fading, the Masoretes add vowel points throughout the Hebrew Bible, including the ketiv-qere hybrid over the Tetragrammaton.

12th century CE

A transliteration appears

The hybrid pointed form is read literally by at least one scribe or translator and rendered into Latin script as Yehowah — the reading-cue voiced as if it were the name itself.

16th–17th century CE

Jehovah enters print

The forms Iehouah and, once J and I separate as letters, Jehovah appear in printed Bibles and become the standard English rendering of the hybrid form for the next several centuries.

19th century – present

Yahweh and Yehovah, side by side

Text-critical scholarship converges on Yahweh as the closer reconstruction of the earlier pronunciation, while Jehovah and the more literally transliterated Yehovah remain in active liturgical and devotional use in the traditions that hold them.

Glossary

Tetragrammaton: The four Hebrew consonants יהוה (YHWH) that make up the personal name of God in the Hebrew Bible.
Ketiv / Qere: Aramaic for "written" / "read" — a Masoretic device flagging that the word to be spoken aloud differs from the consonants on the page.
Masoretes: Scribes active roughly 6th–10th century CE who developed the standard system of Hebrew vowel points and cantillation marks.
Tiberian vocalization: The specific, most widely adopted Masoretic pointing system, named for the school of scribes centered in Tiberias.
Qere perpetuum: A "permanent" qere — a reading substitution applied every time a word occurs, without a marginal note, as is the case throughout the Bible for the Tetragrammaton.
Adonai: Hebrew for "my Lord"; the word traditionally read aloud in place of the Tetragrammaton.