Jah

Jah or Yah (, Yah) is a short form, the first syllable, of Yahweh (in consonantal spelling YHWH , the four letters that form the tetragrammaton), the personal name of God which the ancient Israelites used. This short form of the name occurs 50 times in the text of the Hebrew Bible, of which 24 form part of the phrase "Hallelujah", which is actually a two-word phrase, not one word. In an English-language context, the name Jah is now most commonly associated with the Rastafari. It is otherwise mostly limited to the phrase Hallelujah and theophoric names such as Elijah. In the King James Version (1611) there is only a single instance of JAH (capitalised), in Psalm 68:4. An American Translation (1939) follows KJV in using Yah in this verse. The conventional English pronunciation of Jah is ˈdʒɑː, even though the letter J here transliterates the palatal approximant (Hebrew י Yodh). The spelling Yah is designed to make the pronunciation ˈjɑː explicit in an English-language context (see also romanization of Hebrew).