Gideon's Altar: What does "Jehovah shalom" mean?

Jehovah Shalom means something approximating, “the Lord is Peace”, and is sometimes used more loosely to mean, “the Lord is my peace” or that the Lord gives peace. The phrase occurs only once in the Bible, in the book of Judges, chapter 6, verse 23. In this episode, the ancient Israelites had been defeated by a group called the Midianites and were being oppressed by them. Whenever the Israelites tried to sow seeds and grow their crops, the Midianites came and destroyed the produce that the Israelites had planted so that they barely had anything to eat.

The Israelites eventually threw off the yoke of these oppressors through a righteous young man named Gideon. God personally chose Gideon to lead the Israelites to victory over the Midianites. In a colorful exchange recorded in Judges 6, Gideon pushes back against God’s call on the grounds that his clan was the weakest, and he was the least in his father’s house. Throughout their encounters, God indulged Gideon’s requests for miraculous signs—including multiple requests to make a fleece alternatively wet or dry, to prove that he really was chosen and would lead Israel to victory over its enemies. But Gideon first realized that it was the Lord, the God of Gods, speaking to him when he placed a sacrifice of meat and unleavened bread on a particular stone and it was consumed by a sudden, miraculous fire. When he saw this, Gideon realized that he was indeed interacting with the Lord, so he did what any normal, rational ancient person would have done in that situation: he built an altar on the spot.

“Then the Lord said to him, ‘Peace be with you; do not fear, you shall not die.’ So Gideon built an altar there to the Lord and called it The-Lord-Is-Peace. To this day it is still in Ophrah of the Abiezrites.” (Judges 6:23-24)

What does Jehovah Shalom mean in Hebrew?

This name, “The-Lord-Is-Peace,” is a translation of Jehovah Shalom. “Jehovah” means “Lord” or “The Lord” and “Shalom” means “peace,” so taken together it means something like, “the Lord is peace”.

There is, however, some debate about whether “Jehovah” is the correct pronunciation of the word. The original word in Hebrew was not Jehovah, but a word with all consonants: YHWH, written in Hebrew as יהוה. In fact, in Ancient Hebrew all words were originally written without vowels, as a set of consonants. The vowels were later introduced as small dots and marks, called “pointing.” Because they were introduced much later, however, we don’t always know exactly what they were, especially in the case of the word YHWH.

Why is that? Because the ancient Israelites worried about violating the second commandment (or third, depending on whether you follow the list in Exodus or the list in Deuteronomy) about “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” Rather than risk breaking this commandment by saying the name in a bad context, they decided to stop saying the name at all. They committed to this law for so long that the original pronunciation was lost, and all that remained were the consonants YHWH. As a result, there are disputes about the correct pronunciation of the word. The pronunciation “Jehovah” was first introduced in the 1500s by a Biblical scholar named William Tyndale, but “Yahweh” is another possibility, and is more widely used today. The “J” sound is a modern English sound that many argue would not have been found in the original Hebrew, whereas a “Y” would have been more appropriate for that particular Hebrew letter.

Is there a Jehovah shalom prayer?

There isn’t one particular prayer or song that is the “Jehovah shalom” prayer, at least, not to my knowledge. The idea that God brings peace or can be our peace is a general sentiment among many people across multiple religions and finds expression across all kinds of different prayers and songs in different cultures.

The phrase is perhaps most commonly known as a greeting (as well as a goodbye) among Hebrew speakers. Because “shalom” simply means “peace,” using it as a greeting means something like, “peace be upon you” or simply “peace,” much like the way we say “peace” as a goodbye in English. Among traditional Christians—like eastern Orthodox, Catholics, and some high church Protestants, the phrase “peace be to all” is a standard part of the liturgy that the priest says to the congregation, who reply, “and to thy spirit.”