A very bizarre criticism of Islam has been popularized recently. The argument is that the Qur’an supposedly lacks credibility because it never uses the divine name “YHWH” (the Tetragrammaton).

At first glance, this may appear persuasive to some who are unfamiliar with the linguistic and theological landscape of the biblical tradition. Upon closer examination, however, it proves to be built on a series of flawed assumptions concerning the function of divine names, the nature of language, and the biblical text itself.

The argument implicitly assumes that authentic revelation must preserve the exact phonetic form of the divine name across every language and every covenantal context. Yet neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament operate according to such a principle.

Linguistics and History

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God is addressed by a wide variety of names and titles, each emphasizing different aspects of His nature or relationship with humanity. Alongside the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), Scripture frequently employs Elohim, El, Eloah, El Elyon, El Shaddai, Adonai, Avinu (“our Father”), and numerous other designations. These are not treated as inferior substitutes but, rather, as fully legitimate ways of referring to the same God. The biblical authors therefore demonstrate that divine identification is not dependent upon the exclusive usage of a single lexical form. Rather, the identity of God is established by context, theology, and revelation, not merely by pronunciation.

This principle becomes even clearer when Scripture crosses linguistic boundaries. Portions of the Hebrew Bible are written in Aramaic, where the corresponding term for God is Elah (or Alaha in later dialects), not Elohim. When the New Testament was written in Greek, the inspired authors did not preserve the Hebrew pronunciation of the divine name. Instead, they overwhelmingly used Theos (“God”) and Kyrios (“Lord”), even when quoting Old Testament passages containing YHWH. In fact, the New Testament consistently replaces the Tetragrammaton with Greek equivalents rather than transliterating it. This demonstrates that inspired Scripture itself does not consider preservation of the Hebrew phonetic form to be a theological necessity. If retaining “YHWH” were essential for preserving the identity of God, the New Testament would represent the greatest departure from that standard.

The linguistic evidence further undermines the criticism. Arabic belongs to the same Northwest/Central Semitic linguistic family as Hebrew and Aramaic. The Arabic word Allah is not an innovation introduced by Islam. It is the natural Arabic reflex of the same ancient Semitic vocabulary used for God across related languages. The progression is readily observable: Hebrew El, Eloah; Aramaic Elah or Alaha; Syriac Alaha; Arabic Allah. These forms derive from the common Proto-Semitic root ʾ-L, which has referred to deity for millennia. From a historical-linguistic perspective, Allah stands squarely within the same family of cognate Semitic terms that biblical languages themselves employ. Its relationship to Eloah and Alaha is direct and etymologically transparent.

Ironically, if one’s concern is preserving continuity with biblical language, Allah is considerably closer to the vocabulary of the biblical world than the English word “God.” The latter derives from the Proto-Germanic *gudan, an entirely different linguistic root with no etymological connection to the Semitic ʾ-L family.

English-speaking Christians routinely use “God” without believing they have thereby abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (peace be upon all of them). If translating the divine designation into an unrelated Germanic language does not compromise the identity of the biblical God, then using the native Semitic word Allah (a cognate of the biblical forms) most certainly cannot be regarded as evidence against the Qur’an’s authenticity. To argue otherwise would require applying a standard to Arabic that Christians do not apply to Greek, Latin, English, or virtually any other language.

Moreover, the criticism overlooks the historical reality that Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians used the word Allah centuries before the rise of Islam and have continued to do so ever since. Pre-Islamic Arabic translations of biblical material, Arabic inscriptions, and later Arabic Bibles all employ Allah as the ordinary word for the God of Scripture. Even today, Arabic-speaking Christians refer to God as Allah. This demonstrates that Allah is not an exclusively Islamic name. Rather, it is the standard Arabic designation for the one God worshipped in the Abrahamic tradition.

The critique also misunderstands the function of the Tetragrammaton within the biblical narrative itself. YHWH is not presented as God’s only valid name. It is His covenantal name revealed specifically within Israel’s historical relationship with Him. Even within the Hebrew Bible, this covenant name coexists alongside numerous universal titles used when addressing broader audiences or emphasizing God’s role as Creator and Sovereign of all nations. The Qur’an likewise presents itself as a universal revelation addressed to all humanity, not exclusively to ethnic Israel, making its preference for the universally intelligible Arabic term Allah entirely consistent with its own theological framework.

Ultimately, the objection rests on a double standard. It implicitly accepts that God may be called Theos in Greek, Deus in Latin, God in English, Dieu in French, and Gott in German, yet there is only an objection when the Qur’an uses the native Arabic cognate Allah. Such a position is difficult to sustain linguistically, historically, or biblically. The biblical tradition itself establishes that God’s identity transcends any single human language, that inspired revelation freely employs translated and contextualized designations for God, and that covenantal faithfulness has never depended upon preserving a single ancient Hebrew pronunciation across every linguistic community.

Consequently, the absence of the Tetragrammaton from the Qur’an cannot reasonably be presented as evidence against its credibility, because the very scriptural tradition from which the criticism is drawn does not treat the phonetic preservation of “YHWH” as a criterion for authentic revelation.

RELATED: Preservation of Monotheism: Islam vs. Judaism

YHWH and the Jews

A further difficulty with the criticism is that it presupposes the continual pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) as the normative biblical practice, when both historical and Jewish literary evidence point in the opposite direction.

By the end of the Second Temple period, the very period in which Jesus lived, the overwhelming majority of Jews no longer pronounced the divine name in ordinary speech. Out of reverence and fear of violating the commandment against taking God’s name in vain (Exodus 20:7), the Tetragrammaton was customarily substituted with Adonai (“Lord”) during public readings of Scripture, while in everyday conversation Jews increasingly preferred expressions such as ha-Shem (“the Name”).

Consequently, the divine name became less a spoken designation and more a sacred written symbol whose vocalization was deliberately avoided.

This practice was not merely a later medieval development. It is firmly rooted in the rabbinic tradition itself. The Mishnah records that the High Priest pronounced the Ineffable Name only during the Temple service on the Day of Atonement (Yoma 6:2), while the assembled people responded by falling on their faces in worship:

[…] and the priests and the people standing in the Temple courtyard, when they would hear the Explicit Name emerging from the mouth of the High Priest, when the High Priest did not use one of the substitute names for God, they would kneel and prostrate themselves and fall on their faces, and say: Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.

Outside this unique liturgical context, the divine name was not spoken publicly. The Babylonian Talmud expands upon this tradition, stating that after the deaths of certain righteous priests, even the priestly transmission of the correct pronunciation became increasingly restricted (Kiddushin 71a). The same passage explains that the divine name was entrusted only to select disciples that were regarded as spiritually worthy, indicating that its pronunciation had become esoteric knowledge rather than part of ordinary Jewish worship:

The Sages taught: Initially, the Sages would transmit the twelve-letter name of God to any person. When the uninhibited ones who used the name disrespectfully increased, they would transmit it only to discreet members of the priesthood, and the discreet members of the priesthood would pronounce the name during the Priestly Benediction. They would conceal it by saying it during the sweet melody of their priestly brothers, so that it would not become publicly known. It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Tarfon, who was himself a priest, said: On one occasion I ascended after my mother’s brother to the platform to give the Priestly Benediction, and I inclined my ear near the High Priest, and I heard him conceal the name during the sweet melody of his priestly brothers.

Elsewhere, the Talmud associates casual or unnecessary pronunciation of the divine name with irreverence, reinforcing the notion that avoidance, not frequent vocalization, had become the accepted expression of piety.

The rabbinic tradition goes even further by acknowledging that the pronunciation itself was eventually forgotten by the wider community. Since the Hebrew Bible records only the consonants without vowels; and because generations deliberately refrained from pronouncing the name aloud, the original vocalization ceased to be preserved publicly.

This explains why modern scholarly reconstructions such as “Yahweh” remain educated hypotheses rather than certainties. Indeed, no ancient Jewish source unequivocally records the original pronunciation, and the familiar English form “Jehovah” is universally recognized by scholars as a much later hybrid created by combining the consonants YHWH with the vowel points of Adonai. Other popular pronunciations include Yehweh and Yahveh, but none can be proven with certainty. Ironically, many critics who insist that the Qur’an should have used YHWH cannot themselves pronounce the name with historical certainty.

The New Testament reflects precisely this Jewish reverential practice. As we saw earlier, although Jesus (peace be upon him) and the apostles frequently quote Old Testament passages containing the Tetragrammaton, the Greek text never reproduces the Hebrew name. Instead, it consistently employs Kyrios (“Lord”) and Theos (“God”), following the convention already established by the Septuagint, i.e., the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that were widely used during the first century.

Thus, the inspired Christian Scriptures themselves do not insist upon preserving the Hebrew form of the covenant name, even when directly citing passages in which YHWH appears. If preserving the phonetic form of the Tetragrammaton were essential to identifying the true God, one would expect the New Testament authors to have retained it… Alas, they of course did not.

Romans 10 provides perhaps the clearest New Testament demonstration that the apostles themselves did not regard the preservation of the Hebrew pronunciation of the divine name as essential. In Romans 10:13, Paul explicitly quotes Joel 2:32, a passage in the Hebrew Masoretic Text which reads, “Everyone who calls upon the name of YHWH shall be saved.” Yet when Paul cites this verse in Greek, he does not attempt to preserve, transliterate, or even mention the Tetragrammaton. Instead, he writes, “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord (Kyrios) shall be saved.”

This is not an accidental omission nor an isolated textual phenomenon. Paul is following the established Jewish tradition that is reflected in the Septuagint, where YHWH is consistently rendered as Kyrios rather than retained in Hebrew.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. Paul was a Pharisee educated under Gamaliel, thoroughly trained in the Hebrew Scriptures and intimately familiar with the divine name. If any New Testament author had theological reason to preserve the Tetragrammaton, it would have been Paul. Instead, “under inspiration,” he freely translates the divine designation into Greek and expects his readers to understand that Kyrios faithfully refers to the God that Joel identified as YHWH. His concern is not the phonetic preservation of the Hebrew name. It is the continuity of the divine identity.

The cumulative evidence therefore establishes important principles, i.e., that:

1. within Judaism itself, reverence for the divine name resulted in its replacement by titles such as Adonai and ha-Shem; and that
2. within Christianity, the inspired authors translated those same passages using Kyrios and Theos.

In neither tradition was the identity of the God of Abraham understood to depend upon preserving the exact Hebrew pronunciation of YHWH.

Consequently, criticizing the Qur’an for using Allah instead of the Tetragrammaton imposes a standard that neither the Jewish nor the Christian scriptural traditions actually follow.

RELATED: Intra-New Testament Diversity: Did Paul Deform Christianity?

Which YHWH?

At this stage, the criticism effectively collapses under its own assumptions. If the objection is that the Qur’an does not use “YHWH,” then one must first answer a far more fundamental question: which YHWH?

As demonstrated previously, the historical reality is that neither Judaism nor Christianity possesses the original pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton with certainty. Rabbinic Judaism deliberately abandoned its public pronunciation centuries before the advent of Islam, restricting its use until the tradition itself disappeared. Christianity inherited a Greek-speaking scriptural tradition that almost universally replaced the divine name with Kyrios, while later translations rendered it simply as “Lord.”

Consequently, no major Jewish or Christian community today actually pronounces the divine name as it was spoken by Moses, David, or the prophets (peace upon all of them).

Instead, modern readers encounter competing reconstructions, “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” “Yehweh,” “Yahveh,” and others, all of which are ultimately attempts to recover a pronunciation that history no longer preserves with certainty. The irony is therefore quite striking: critics demand that the Qur’an employ a pronunciation that they themselves cannot establish with confidence.

This exposes the fundamental inconsistency of the argument: if the identity of the true God genuinely depended upon preserving the exact phonetic form of His covenant name, then both Judaism and Christianity would face an insurmountable problem, for that pronunciation has been absent from ordinary worship for nearly two millennia… yet neither religion concludes that God’s identity has therefore been lost.

Jews continue to worship the God of Abraham while saying Adonai or ha-Shem and Christians continue to worship Him while saying “Lord,” Kyrios, God, Deus, Dieu, or Gott. Their worship is understood to be directed toward the same God despite the complete absence of the original pronunciation.

Once this principle is acknowledged, the objection to the Qur’an becomes impossible to sustain consistently.

Indeed, if one were genuinely concerned with preserving the linguistic heritage of the biblical world, Allah is arguably one of the most natural designations available. Unlike English “God,” German Gott, or other Indo-European equivalents, Allah belongs to the very same Semitic linguistic family as El, Eloah, and Alaha. It is not merely a translation. It is a direct cognate, descending from the same Proto-Semitic root (ʾ-L) that has referred to the Creator across the Semitic languages for thousands of years.

In other words, while modern Jews no longer pronounce YHWH and most Christians refer to God using words derived from entirely unrelated linguistic families, the Qur’an employs the native Arabic descendant of the same ancient Semitic vocabulary that the biblical prophets themselves used. From a historical and linguistic perspective, Allah therefore preserves greater continuity with the language of biblical revelation than many of the terms commonly used by the very critics who object to it.

Ultimately, the criticism mistakes phonetics for identity. Scripture itself never teaches that God’s identity is preserved through the uninterrupted pronunciation of four Hebrew consonants. Rather, both the biblical and post-biblical traditions demonstrate precisely the opposite: languages change, translations change, titles change, yet the referent remains the same.

The God worshipped by Abraham is identified by His nature, His acts, and His covenant, not by the preservation of a single Hebrew pronunciation whose original vocalization had already disappeared long before the Qur’an was revealed. Not only does the Qur’an reflect this principle, it explicitly articulates it. Rather than tying God’s identity to one exclusive designation, it teaches:

Say [to the people, O Prophet ]: Call upon Allah, or call upon the All-Merciful (al-Rahman). By either [name] you may call [Him]. For [He is One, and] to Him [alone] belong the most excellent names. Yet do not be excessively loud with your Prayer, [O Prophet], Nor be [unduly] muted. Rather, seek a way of moderation in between them. (Qur’an, 17:110)

In light of that historical reality, not only is the Qur’an’s use of Allah unproblematic; it is exactly what one would expect from a revelation communicated to an Arabic-speaking people.

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Allah and the Universal Religion

Having demonstrated that the absence of the Tetragrammaton poses no difficulty for the Qur’an, a more interesting question emerges: if God were to reveal Himself in Arabic, what would one actually expect Him to call Himself? From both a linguistic and theological perspective, the answer is precisely what the Qur’an uses: Allah.

Unlike many words translated as “god,” Allah is not merely a generic noun denoting one deity among many. Classical Arabic distinguishes carefully between ilah (إله), meaning “a god,” “a deity,” or “an object of worship”; and Allah (الله), which functions as the unique proper designation of the one supreme God. This distinction mirrors the difference between saying “a king” and referring to “the King.” The former is a category; the latter identifies the unique bearer of supreme authority.

This is significant because the Qur’an consistently emphasizes God’s absolute uniqueness. It does not only claim that Allah is a god worthy of worship. Rather, it declares that there is no ilah except Allah (la ilaha illAllah). In other words, every conceivable claimant to divinity falls under the category of ilah, but only one truly possesses that reality. The language itself reflects the Qur’an’s uncompromising monotheism (tawhid).

Moreover, Allah possesses a semantic richness that few translations can adequately capture. The English word “God” can function as either a common noun (“the gods of Egypt”) or a proper title (“God created the heavens and the earth”). Its meaning depends largely upon context. The Arabic Allah, by contrast, is inherently singular. It has no accepted plural form, no grammatical gender, and no equivalent meaning “one god among others.” It cannot naturally be used for idols, pagan deities, or mythological beings. Those are alihah (plural of ilah), never Allah. Consequently, the very structure of the language reserves Allah exclusively for the one absolute Creator.

There is also a theological elegance to the name itself. The Qur’an never presents Allah as one name competing with others. Rather, it presents it as the comprehensive name under which all of God’s attributes are gathered. Mercy, Power, Wisdom, Majesty, Justice, Forgiveness, and every other divine perfection are not independent names referring to different aspects of separate beings. They are attributes of Allah.

There is, however, an even deeper theological distinction between YHWH and Allah. The Tetragrammaton is not introduced in the Hebrew Bible as God’s universal name for all humanity but, rather, as His covenant name revealed within His special relationship with Israel. In Exodus 6:2–3, God supposedly told Moses (peace be upon him):

I am YHWH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by My name YHWH I was not known to them.

Whatever the precise interpretation of this verse, the narrative is clear: the revelation of YHWH is intimately connected to the Exodus, the Mosaic covenant, and Israel’s national identity. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God is repeatedly called “YHWH, the God of Israel,” emphasizing His covenant with a particular people. The Tetragrammaton therefore functions primarily as a covenantal designation rather than as a universal name revealed equally to all nations.

The Qur’an, by contrast, presents itself as a revelation for all humanity, not just for one covenant nation. It consistently addresses mankind as a whole and describes God as “Lord of [All] the Worlds” (rabb al-‘alamin). In such a context, one would not expect the Qur’an to adopt the specifically Hebrew covenant name by which God identified Himself to Israel. Rather, one would expect it to use the natural Arabic designation for the one Creator, and that is precisely what it does with Allah.

This also accords with the broader biblical narrative. Before the revelation of YHWH to Moses, the patriarchs knew God by names such as El, Eloah, and El Shaddai. Likewise, non-Israelite figures such as Melchizedek and Job worship the true God without centering their devotion on the Tetragrammaton. The biblical record therefore demonstrates that knowledge of the true God was never contingent upon the use of the covenant name YHWH. That name belonged to a particular stage of God’s covenantal self-disclosure, whereas the Creator Himself has always been known across different peoples and languages.

From this perspective, Allah is arguably the more universal designation. Unlike YHWH, which is intrinsically tied to the Hebrew language and Israel’s covenant history, Allah simply identifies the one supreme God in Arabic. It is the natural Semitic designation for the Creator, not bound to a single ethnicity, nation, or covenant, making it entirely fitting for a revelation that presents itself as a message to all mankind.

And Allah knows best.

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