Adonai

Adonai

אֲדֹנָי (ăḏonāy, Biblical Hebrew pronunciation:, lit. transl. My Lords, pluralis majestatis taken as singular) is the possessive form of adon ('Lord'), along with the first-person singular pronoun enclitic. As with Elohim, Adonai's grammatical form is usually explained as a form akin to the "royal we". In the Hebrew Bible, the word is nearly always used to refer to God (approximately 450 occurrences). As the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton came to be avoided in the Hellenistic period, Jews may have begun to drop the Tetragrammaton when presented alongside Adonai and subsequently to expand it to cover for the Tetragrammaton in the forms of spoken prayer and written scripture. Owing to the expansion of chumra, the idea of 'building a fence around the Torah', the word Adonai itself has come to be too holy to say for Orthodox Jews outside of prayer, leading to its replacement by HaShem ('The Name').