The Four Letters of His Name

The angel told Joseph to call the Child Yeshua, “for He will save His people from their sins.” The name and the reason were given in one breath. In this chapter we open the name itself and see how its letters carry that meaning.

From Hebrew to Greek

As we noted in Chapter 5, the Gospels write the name in Greek as Iesous, a rendering of the Hebrew name Yeshua, and the Hebrew is the root. Greek had no letter for the “sh” sound of the Hebrew shin, and no letter for the throat sound of the Hebrew ayin, so the Greek spelling could only come near the Hebrew. It also gave the name a final -s, as Greek does with many names. The name the angel spoke was Yeshua.

Hebrew writes its words with consonants, and it reads them from right to left. The name Yeshua has four consonants.

The Four Letters

Here they are in the order a Hebrew reader meets them.

The first letter, yod, is the first letter of the name of God, the LORD (יהוה), which is written yod, heh, vav, heh. So the name opens by pointing to the LORD.

The other three letters, shin, vav and ayin, together spell Shua (שׁוּעַ), and Shua means salvation. The last letter, ayin, is one of the three letters of the root yasha, the root of the Hebrew words for saving and salvation.

Put the two parts side by side and the name reads as a short sentence: Yod for the LORD, and Shua for salvation. Yeshua means “The LORD is salvation,” or “The LORD saves.”

None of this is a private reading. That Yeshua is made of the divine name and the root of salvation, and so means “The LORD saves,” is the standard understanding in the dictionaries and commentaries.

The Vav Went Nowhere

There is one small letter that is easy to lose. A common way of explaining the name is to say that it joins the divine name to the verb yasha, “to save.” That is true as far as it goes, but if we only add yod to the three letters of yasha (yod, shin, ayin), the third letter of the name, the vav, seems to have nowhere to go.

It is not lost. The vav stands in the middle of Shua and gives it the “u” sound. It belongs to the word that means salvation. Read the four letters as the text writes them, and nothing is left over: yod, then shin, vav, ayin. The LORD, then salvation.

Think of how a signature works on a letter. A man may sign with his full name or with his initial, and anyone who knows him knows whose hand it is. The yod at the head of the name is that kind of mark: one letter, and it points to the name of God. After it comes the word that says what He does.

“For He Will Save”

Now return to the angel’s sentence from Chapter 5: “you shall call His name Yeshua, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). In English the second half can sound like a comment added to the name. To a reader who knows the Hebrew, it is the name explained: call Him by the name that says the LORD saves, because He will save His people from their sins. The name is not a label stuck onto the Child from outside. It says in four letters what He came to do, and who it is that does it.

This is why Matthew 1:21 and the name cannot be pulled apart. When the angel gave the reason, “He will save,” he was reading the name aloud in other words.

The Name of a High Priest

The four-letter name carries one more thing, and it comes from a man who bore this exact form of the name. In Ezra and Nehemiah several men bear it, and one of them is the high priest who came back from Babylon in the first company of the returning exiles and who, with Zerubbabel, began to rebuild the house of God.

Ezra 3:2 And Yeshua son of Jozadak rose up, and his brothers the priests, and Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and his brothers, and they built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer up upon it burnt offerings, as written in the Torah of Moses the man (ish אִישׁ eesh) of God.

“Yeshua son of Jozadak” is the four-letter name, the very form that matches the name in the Gospels (H3442). The man who bore it stood at the head of the priests when the altar of the God of Israel was set up again.

Yet the Child who received this name was not from the tribe of Levi. Matthew begins his record with His descent through Judah (Matthew 1:2-3), and the writer of Hebrews says it plainly.

Hebrews 7:14 For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests.

He came by the royal line of Judah, the line of David, yet He bore the name of a high priest, and so His name holds the two together: King by His birth, and named as the priest who rebuilt the house of God. That the Messiah is both King and High Priest is not a new idea. Zechariah was told to set crowns on the head of the high priest of his day and to speak a word over him.

Zechariah 6:11-12 and take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them upon the head of Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and you shall speak to him, saying, Thus says the LORD of hosts (tzevaot צָבָא tsaw-baw'), saying, Behold, a man (ish) whose name is the Branch; and from under him he shall branch up, and he shall build the temple of the LORD.

The crowns were set on the head of “Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest,” the same man Ezra calls Yeshua, and over him came the word, “Behold, a man (ish) whose name is the Branch,” who “shall build the temple of the LORD.” Hebrews 7 argues the same truth from the order of Melchizedek. That the Messiah is King and High Priest is the common understanding of the church. What this study notices is that the name He was given says it too.

Four Letters and One Question

So the four letters can be read in order: yod, pointing to the LORD; shin, vav, ayin, spelling Shua, salvation. The name says “The LORD is salvation,” and the angel said, “He will save.”

But that reading rests on one claim, that Shua by itself means salvation. Is that true, or is it only a guess drawn from the longer word? Scripture answers the question for us. Shua does not have to be cut out of another name to be heard. It stands alone in the text, as a name of its own, in the story of Judah.