Perhaps it is preferable to say that the sacred name, though perhaps in a somewhat modified form, had been in use in the patriarchal family before the time of Moses. On Mt. Horeb God revealed and explained the accurate form of His name, Jahveh.
* The sacred name occurs in Genesis about 156 times; this frequent occurrence can hardly be a mere prolepsis.
* Gen., iv, 26, states that Enos "began to call upon the name of the Lord [Jahveh]", or as the Hebrew text suggests, "began to call himself after the name of Jahveh".
* Jochabed, the mother of Moses, has in her name an abbreviated form Jo (Yo) of Jahveh. The pre-Mosaic existence of the Divine name among the Hebrews accounts for this fact more easily than the supposition that the Divine element was introduced after the revelation of the name.
* Among the 163 proper names which bear an element of the sacred name in their composition, 48 have yeho or yo at the beginning, and 115 have yahu or yah and the end, while the form Jahveh never occurs in any such composition. Perhaps it might be assumed that these shortened forms yeho, yo, yahu, yah, represent the Divine name as it existed among the Isralites before the full name Jahveh was revealed on Mt. Horeb. On the other hand, Driver (Studia biblica, I, 5) has shown that these short forms are the regular abbreviations of the full name. At any rate, while it is not certain that God revealed His sacred name to Moses for the first time, He surely revealed on Mt. Horeb that Jahveh is His incommunicable name, and explained its meaning.