Question: Why does WLC use YAHUWAH for the sacred name rather than the more widely accepted YAHWEH? YaHWeH has all of the consonants that are found in the tetragrammaton (YHWH) with only two added vowels for easy flow. It seems unnecessary to me to add a third syllable to the holy name when the tetragrammaton was simply YHWH. Would not a two-syllable YAHWEH would be closer to the original than the longer YAHUWAH?
Answer: Vowels are used as needed for meaning, not for the easy flow of sound. When considering the sacred name of the Creator, it is important to take into account more than just how many letters make up the tetragrammaton of the name. Many people do refer to the Father as Yahweh or Yahveh, but this is a more recent version that is inconsistent with other evidence.
Before the discovery of ancient manuscripts revealed that ancient Hebrew did not have a [J], the closest translators could get to the holy name was JEHOVAH. Thus it is translated in the King James Version:
That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth. (Psalm 83:18)
Behold, God [Elohim] is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation. (Isaiah 12:2)
Trust ye in the LORD forever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength. (Isaiah 26:4)
It is abundantly clear that the translators struggled to know what to do with the texts found in Isaiah. Neither "God" nor "LORD" is the name of the Creator, but in both texts there appeared a contraction of the name Yahuwah as well as the name itself. The translators chose to distinguish the two as LORD (#3050) and JEHOVAH (#3068). In the original Hebrew, the phrase would have been Yah YAHUWAH.
The word Jehovah, which was as close as they knew to get to Yahuwah, is a three-syllable word. Yahweh/Yahveh is a two-syllable word. There is no way to make the sacred name (#3068) into a two-syllable word without losing some of the meaning.
The holy name means, literally, I AM THAT I AM. This is a name that is composed of a repeated state-of-being-verb: I AM. The name Yahweh/Yahveh simply means I AM I AM. The word "THAT" is a restrictive modifier. It specifies which I AM. Frankly, the divine name breaks all the rules of English grammar. Suffice it to say, anyone can use the phrase "I am." In fact, it is used all the time:
The Almighty Creator has chosen a state-of-being verb as the only name which truly encapsulates Who and What He is. YAHUWAH, the three-syllable word, spells out I AM THAT I AM.
In order to get the relative pronoun "THAT" (used as a restrictive modifier) to specify which I AM, it is necessary to have the word huw (#1931, Strong's) in there. This makes the holy name a three syllable word, not a two-syllable word.
Further evidence that the divine name consisted of three syllables, rather than two, is found in the Greek attempt to transliterate the name. The Old Testament Scriptures were translated into Greek well before the Saviour was born. At that time, an attempt was made to transliterate YAHUWAH into Greek. One immediate problem the translators faced was that ancient Greek did not contain a [Y]. It was necessary to substitute Greek letters that had as close a sound to [Y] as they could get.
Josephus, a Jew contemporary with Yahushua, wrote histories of the Israelites for a Greek audience. In Jewish Wars, 5. 5. 7, he wrote that the holy name was made up of "four vowels." Because his intended audience spoke Greek, 'Josephus frequently altered Hebrew names, spelling them after the fashion of the Greeks, "to please [his Greek] readers' (Antiquities, 1. 5. 1.)" (B. Earl Allen, Publish the Name of Yahuwah, p. 20.)
It is reasonable to assume that Josephus' changing of Hebrew names was more than a sycophantic attempt to please his audience. Rather, it was an attempt to write the names using Greek letters, when often those names contained sounds that did not exist in Greek. This is still done between languages.
For example, Spanish (a Latin language) contains a letter and sound that does not exist in English (a Germanic language). The letter ñ does not exist in English. However, by combining the letters [ainya] a close approximation of the sound can be achieved.
An extreme example of this is the African language of Xhosa. There are absolutely no letters at all in English by which one can indicate the particular loud "clicking" sound that is heard repeatedly in Xhosa. Lacking anything else to do, English sticks in an [X] to indicate the sound. However, in English [X] does not make a clicking sound. It makes a [Z] sound or a [KSSS] sound.
However, even though Greek did not have a [Y] sound, the Greek attempt to transliterate the name still had three-syllables. If the divine name had only two-syllables in Hebrew, the Greek transliteration would have had two syllables as well.
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Try to pronounce IEUE as the letters sound in English. You will see that even rendered that way, the name is a three-syllable name.
The evidence indicates that the holy, divine name consisted of three-syllables and in order to get the complete meaning of I AM THAT I AM, the third syllable of huw is a necessary addition.