So What does YHWH stand for or is it a name?
It is the anglicised letters of the Hebrew alphabet which represent the name of God, sometimes also written YHVH
The Jews never wrote the name in full; it is considered too holy. You will see some people write G_d sometimes in the same show of respect. From these letters we get the name Jehovah from German translations - though English speakers always mispronounce it, there is no j sound in German, it should be pronounced as a y. From the same letters comes the name Yahweh. In both cases people have 'guessed' by inserting vowels between the letters: the Jews did not dare to speak His name nor write it, and the true name known long ago became lost.
In the Psalms however many times His name is written Yah - a shorter version of the holy name. From this comes the alternate name that rastifarians, and true Christians from the Caribbean islands are well known to use, Jah.
The proper title for thus name is the Tetragrammaton, which is Latin for 4 letters. Search this term on the internet and you will find more information than I can provide.
Hizikiah has been writing this name using the Hebrew letters instead of the anglicised form, when he quotes scripture, out of reverence. Whenever you see in the old testament the word LORD written in all capital letters, it is this name which is found in the original Hebrew that has been translated.
Nowhere in the new testament is this name ever written - though some 'hebrew roots' people have re-written the NT and, because they claim it was originally written in Hebrew, not Greek, have inserted the name into the text. There is however no evidence at all ((that i'm aware of)) that their claims are true - it is IMO only that they want it to be so, because of what i believe is a romanticised view of ethnic Jewry that they are swept up in, as though they are somehow more holy by sprinkling their native speech with Hebrew words. But I know for them it is reverence -- really a deep, complicated subject for other threads, and we have many such threads on that already...
