Hallelujah Meaning

"Hallelujah" — Two Hebrew Words

"Hallelujah" is a transliterated Hebrew compound: hallelu + Yah. It means, literally, "Praise ye Yah" — where "Yah" is a short form of YHWH, the covenant name of God.

• Hallelu (הַלְלוּ) — masculine plural imperative of the verb halal (הָלַל, Strong's H1984), meaning "to shine, to boast, to praise." In the piel stem used here, it means "Praise!" as a command to a group.
• Yah (יָהּ, H3050) — the poetic short form of the divine name Yahweh/YHWH (H3068). It appears about 50 times in the Hebrew Bible, almost always in poetry.

The full phrase Halelu-Yah (הַלְלוּ־יָהּ) appears 24 times in the Hebrew Bible, all in the book of Psalms.

The Word in the Psalms

Hallelujah opens and closes a cluster of Psalms near the end of the Psalter. Psalms 146–150 are called the Hallel Psalms for this reason — each begins and ends with "Praise ye the LORD" (the KJV's English rendering of Halelu-Yah). Psalm 150, the final psalm, uses the verb halal thirteen times in six verses:

Psalm 150:1, 6 — "Praise ye the LORD... Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD."

A separate cluster, Psalms 113–118, is the "Egyptian Hallel" — sung at Passover and the other major Jewish feasts. These are the psalms Jesus and his disciples would have sung at the Last Supper ("when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives" — Matthew 26:30).

"Alleluia" in the New Testament

Greek has no "h" sound to represent Hebrew's hard breath mark, so the Septuagint (LXX) and the Greek New Testament render Halelu-Yah as Allēlouia (ἀλληλούϊα). This is why English has two spellings: Hallelujah transliterates the Hebrew directly; Alleluia transliterates the Greek.

The word appears only once in the New Testament — in Revelation 19:1–6, four times in rapid succession:

Revelation 19:1 — "And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God."

These four occurrences frame the final declaration of God's victory in John's Apocalypse — the only New Testament use of a word that had been used 24 times in the Psalter.

The Wider Root: Halal

The verb halal is broader than "praise" in contemporary English. Its range includes:

• To shine — as of celestial light. Job 31:26: "the moon walking [in] brightness" uses a related form.
• To boast — Psalm 34:2: "My soul shall make her boast in the LORD."
• To celebrate, extol — the predominant sense in the Psalter.

The Hebrew noun tehillim (תְּהִלִּים) — "praises" — is the Hebrew name of the book English Bibles call Psalms. The entire Psalter is named from the same root as Hallelujah.

Pronunciation

The Hebrew is pronounced ha-lə-lu-YAH with the emphasis on the final syllable (the divine name). English speakers typically stress the third syllable (hal-le-LU-jah), following the cadence of Handel's Messiah (1741), where the "Hallelujah Chorus" shaped the word's rhythm in Western ears for three centuries.