YHWH is God's personal name in the Old Testament, not a title, and how it was originally pronounced is genuinely lost.
YHWH is four Hebrew consonants — yod, he, vav, he — usually called the Tetragrammaton. It appears over 6,800 times in the Hebrew Bible, more than any other word for God. It seems to come from the verb "to be," which is why Exodus 3:14 links it to God saying "I AM WHO I AM" before giving Moses the name in the next verse. So it isn't a job description like king or shepherd. It's a proper name, the way you have one.
Because it's a name and not a common noun, it carries no built-in range of meanings the way a word like chesed does. What it covers is relationship: this is the name Israel's God gave for himself to be called by, used in covenant, worship, and everyday speech about him specifically, as opposed to God in general.
God also told Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.
God gives Moses this specific name to use, right after describing himself as "I AM."
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made them.
The first time YHWH appears paired with Elohim, naming this God as the one who made everything.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
"The LORD is my shepherd" uses the personal name, not a generic word for deity.
I am the LORD; that is My name! I will not yield My glory to another or My praise to idols.
God states the name directly and ties his glory to it: "I am YHWH; that is my name."
English Bibles almost never print "Yahweh." Following an old Jewish practice of not saying the name aloud, translators write "the LORD" in small capitals wherever YHWH appears in the Hebrew, reserving ordinary "Lord" for adonai. That solves one problem and causes another: readers meet a title where the Hebrew text has a name, and the small-caps convention is easy to miss entirely if you're reading quickly.
The name "Jehovah" is often presented as the recovered original pronunciation. It isn't. It's a hybrid formed centuries later by fitting the vowels of adonai onto the consonants YHWH, because Jewish readers said adonai aloud instead of pronouncing the divine name. It's a useful reading aid turned into a mispronunciation, not evidence of how the name actually sounded.
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