Jews also call God
Adonai, Hebrew for "Lord" (Hebrew: ). Formally, this is plural ("my Lords"), but the plural is usually construed as a respectful, and not a
syntactic plural. (The singular form is
Adoni, "my lord". This was used by the Phoenicians for the god
Tammuz and is the origin of the Greek name
Adonis. Jews only use the singular to refer to a distinguished person: in the plural, "rabotai", literally, "my masters", is used in both Mishnaic and modern Hebrew.) Since pronouncing
YHWH is avoided out of reverence for the holiness of the name, Jews use
Adonai instead in prayers, and colloquially would use
Hashem ("the Name"). When the
Masoretes added vowel pointings to the text of the
Hebrew Bible around the eighth century CE, they gave the word YHWH the vowels of
Adonai, to remind the reader to say
Adonai instead. It is thought by some that later Biblical scholars mistook this vowel substitution for the actual spelling of YHWH and interpreted the name of God as "Jehovah". The Sephardi translators of the
Ferrara Bible go further and substitute
Adonai with
A. ==References==