Because they viewed YHWH, God’s personal name, as too holy to be spoken, the Jewish people substituted Adonai (‘‘Lord’’) for it, even using the vowels from Adonai when writing YHWH. The word Jehovah emerged in the 1500s when a German translator combined the Adonai vowels with the YHWH consonants and came up with Yahowah (in German, Jehovah). Jehovah comes from YHWH, not the other way around. See Adonai; havah; Jah; Tetragrammaton; YHWH.