yah

This is the God of Israel's own name, shortened. The full name (יהוה), which English Bibles print as "the LORD," runs through every part of the Hebrew Bible: law, history, prophecy, prayer. The short form behaves quite differently. It appears only about fifty times, almost all of them in poetry, and the great majority of those are in the book of Psalms. It belongs to singing rather than to telling.

Most of the time it turns up inside one fixed shout: "praise Yah," the two words English speakers know as "hallelujah." That shout opens or closes a run of psalms near the end of the book, and it is a plain command addressed to a gathered congregation, not a private exclamation. God's name is the last syllable of it, so anyone who sings it is saying the name whether they realize it or not. When the New Testament pictures heaven at worship, it does not translate the shout either; it simply spells it out in Greek letters (ἀλληλουϊα) in Revelation 19.

Outside that shout the name is used freely, and the settings cluster around rescue and reversal:

• the victory song after the escape from Egypt, where the singers call Yah their strength and their song (Exodus 15:2)
• the thanksgiving of someone who called out from a tight place and was answered (Psalm 118:5)
• the confession that no one could stand if Yah kept a record of sins (Psalm 130:3)

The same short name is the piece hiding at the end of dozens of Hebrew names: the "-iah" of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah. Twice the prophet Isaiah sets the short form directly beside the full one, and once he writes it twice over, which is as close as Hebrew comes to underlining a word.