[dawn53]

Isn't the practice one of leaving out vowels, in order to not spell the name out completely?

Seems to me I remember that JHVH is the accepted way for denoting the word "Jehovah" in Hebrew.

[adam_az]

Isn't the practice one of leaving out vowels, in order to not spell the name out completely?

Seems to me I remember that JHVH is the accepted way for denoting the word "Jehovah" in Hebrew.

You've seen it written that way because biblical Hebrew contains no vowels.

[Dave Elias]

(Here goes my first post - I hope I don't make any enemies!)

In some ways you're all correct.

The ancient Hebrew name for God is a four letter word spelled YHWH. The absence of vowels is confused by some as being a sign of deference. In ancient Hebrew (and Modern Hebrew to a certain extent, although vowel sounds are now indicated with marks) this is not the case, the deletion of vowels is standard syntax. So there is nothing intrinsically special about a word written without vowels. In most cases the correct pronounciation of this word without vowels would have been obvious to those reading it.
For example try interpretting "FR RPBLC". Obvious isn't it? In most cases in Ancient Hebrew it would be even easier to infer a word, since words wouldn't normally be as long as "Republic" or have a double vowel sound ending the word like "Free".

Now comes the fun part. You see in the 22 letter Ancient hebrew alphabet there were four letters that could be pronounced with a consonent sound or a vowel sound (for a modern equivalent think of the letter Y. This can sound as a consonent as in 'Yell' or as a vowel, as in 'Try'). Repectively these were aleph, hey, waw and yud.

See the problem yet? The word YHWH is written entirely using three of these dual use letters. We therefore do not know whether we are supposed to insert vowel sounds when pronouncing or use the vowel form of the three letters, or a combination of the two. What we have as written is unpronouncable word.

It is unlikely this was out of design, because the word was too holy, but in my opinion it is kind of nice it worked out thus.

There are clues as to how it was pronounced which have lingered into modern usage, principally in words such as 'Halleluia' (praise to god) which indicates the first part of YHWH was pronounced 'Yah' or more likely 'Yahoo' if you include the W. It is anyones guess as to the last H, maybe it was silent? What is clear though is that the word was clearly spoken at one point.

The deletion of the 'O' in God is I guess an attempt to acknowledge the enigmatic pronounciation of this word in a language with a different structure.

Regardless of the relatively mundane reason behind the practice, this shouldn't detract from the meaning of the ritual. In fact, knowing as most jewish scholars would, this background, makes it quite a gesture of faith, since they are consciously choosing to treat God with deference in references to him.