YHWH is the four-letter Name, the Tetragrammaton, given at the burning bush when Moses asked what to say to Israel. The answer was ehyeh asher ehyeh, "I will be who I will be," and then the Name itself: YHWH, built from the same root היה, to be. This is not a generic title for deity. It is a name of presence and covenant, spoken only by the One who binds Himself to a people.

By the Second Temple period, Jewish communities spoke Adonai aloud when the Tetragrammaton appeared on the page. The substitution was reverent, an attempt to honor the sanctity of the Name. The Septuagint translators carried the convention into Greek by rendering YHWH as kurios. The Latin Vulgate carried it as Dominus. Tyndale and the KJV team inherited the chain and rendered it as LORD in small caps. Each substitution was faithful. Each substitution also lost something. The reader of a modern English Bible meets Lord six thousand times and rarely meets the Name. The Name is still on the page in the Hebrew. It has simply been pronounced Adonai for two and a half thousand years, and translated away from the English reader for most of the last five hundred.