Many readers do not pronounce or write out the full name. When on, vocalized spellings are blurred until you tap them. Consonantal spellings stay visible.
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Journey of the Name
Follow the evidence in rough chronological order. At each stop, look at what is actually written, what kind of evidence it is, and what it cannot tell us. Scroll to begin.
A topographical list in a temple of Amenhotep III names a “land of the Shasu, Yhwꜣ”. It designates a place or a group. Whether it has anything to do with the later divine name is disputed, and an earlier date does not make it an earlier witness to the god.
A Ramesside list at Amarah West repeats the Shasu-land designations, possibly copying an older list. It is a second Egyptian witness to the designation, but it adds no independent evidence of a link to the deity.
King Mesha of Moab records his war against Israel and names YHWH in line 18. This is the earliest secure writing of the four-letter name as a deity in the corpus. As usual in this script, no vowels are written.
Inscriptions on plaster and storage jars at Kuntillet ʿAjrud use both the four-letter YHWH and a shorter YHW. Which occurrence reads which form depends on the edition consulted.
Two tiny rolled silver amulets, found in a burial cave outside Jerusalem, carry blessing texts that include the divine name. Line-by-line readings and the exact date depend on the critical editions.
A letter from the Judahite fortress at Arad invokes YHWH in a blessing formula, as surveyed by Lemaire. The precise locus is flagged for review against the edition.
Ostraca from Lachish, written shortly before the Babylonian conquest, invoke YHWH in their opening formulas. Personal names in Letter 3 end in -yhw, the element later vocalised -yahu.
At Egypt’s southern frontier, a Judean garrison writes in Aramaic about the temple of its god, spelled YHW and YHH and often vocalised “Yaho”. The papyri show the short form used on its own. The spelling does not record its vowels.
A Greek copy of Leviticus from Qumran Cave 4 writes the name as ΙΑΩ. It is the first witness in the corpus where vowels are written. Whether ΙΑΩ represents the full name or a short form is an open question.
Clement of Alexandria discusses the name. Modern editions often print Iaoue; the main manuscript is reported to read Iaou. Until the manuscript is collated directly, the corpus marks the reading as disputed.
Theodoret reports that Samaritans call the name Iabe, while Jews say Aia, a form usually explained as ehyeh (“I am”, Exod 3:14). This is one author’s report, a millennium after the Iron Age inscriptions, and how accurately he represented Samaritan practice is debated.
Medieval scribes added vowel points to the consonants. On YHWH the points signal a substitute reading such as Adonai. The pointing preserves a reading convention; it is not automatic evidence of ancient vowels. The short form Yah survives in transmitted texts such as Psalm 68:5 (68:4 in English Bibles).
So the question of pronunciation is a question of combining evidence: Greek transcriptions, short forms, name elements and historical phonology. See how each candidate stands, under the same rules.