Hebrew this name consists of the four letters YHWH, and is therefore called the tetragram (maton). There came a time, perhaps about 300 B.C., when the Jews, owing to a. their reverence for God, b. their interpretation of Lev. 24:16, and c. their resulting fear of becoming guilty of the sin of desecration, ceased to pronounce this name. In reading Scripture they substituted for it ’Adonai or, less frequently, ’Elohim. The Masoretes, those Jewish textual experts who flourished between the destruction