What is God's name?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The question conflates two distinct phenomena, and untangling them is the first task. Several of the entries the skeptic lists are not rival proper names at all but epithets — descriptive titles attached to a single deity. "YHWH of hosts" (יהוה צבאות, YHWH tseva'ot) is a construct phrase identifying YHWH by his command of celestial or military armies; it presupposes rather than replaces the name YHWH. "Jealous" in Exodus 34:14 (קַנָּא, qannaʾ) is explicitly glossed in the same clause — "for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" — so the verse itself treats the word as a character-attribute, not a substitute for the tetragrammaton. "I AM THAT I AM" (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה, ehyeh asher ehyeh) in Exodus 3:14 is best read as a theological folk-etymology that explicates the meaning of YHWH from the root היה/הוה ("to be"), not a competing name. "JAH" (יָהּ, yah) in Psalm 68:4 is a recognized poetic short form of YHWH, the same element preserved in "hallelu-yah." To this extent the harmonizing instinct of Gleason Archer and Walter Kaiser is correct: these are functionally one name under multiple descriptions, the way a single person bears titles and epithets. Critical scholarship has no quarrel with that observation; Mark Smith's work on the divine names confirms that titles like ṣebaʾot accrued to YHWH within a single cultic tradition.

The harmonization does not, however, reach the structurally important verse. Exodus 6:2-3 belongs to the Priestly source (P), and P advances a specific and self-conscious theology of progressive revelation: God was known to the patriarchs as El Shaddai but "by my name YHWH I was not known to them." The niphal verb נוֹדַעְתִּי (nodaʿti, "I was [not] made known") is contrastive with the preceding "I appeared... by the name of El Shaddai," so the syntax names one designation that was known and another that was not. P shares this scheme of name-revelation with E, where the name is first disclosed at the burning bush in Exodus 3, against the J source, which uses YHWH freely from the primeval history forward — "then began men to call upon the name of the LORD" at Genesis 4:26, and the patriarchs invoking YHWH by name at Genesis 12:8, 13:4, 15:7, and 26:25. Richard Elliott Friedman treats the distribution of the divine name as one of the foundational fingerprints of source division, and Joel Baden's restatement of the Documentary Hypothesis builds the same observation into its method. William Propp's Anchor Bible treatment reads Exodus 6:3 as P's deliberate correction or supplement to the patriarchal narratives, marking the Mosaic moment as the true onset of name-knowledge.

The upshot is that the question's framing — "multiple passages each claim to be THE divine name" — overstates the difficulty for the epithets but understates it for Exodus 6:3. Isaiah 42:8 ("I am the LORD: that is my name") and Exodus 6:3b ("my name JEHOVAH") are not in conflict with each other; both name YHWH. The real fracture is internal to the Pentateuch: one source insists the name was a Mosaic novelty, another has it in continuous use from creation. The apologetic "different titles" move, valid for the epithets, simply does not engage that conflict, because the issue at Exodus 6:3 is not which title applies but when the name YHWH first became known — a question on which J and P give incompatible answers.

Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable as epithets, but Exodus 6:3 marks a genuine source-critical contradiction over the history of the name.