"Then Moses said to God, 'If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, "The God of your fathers has sent me to you," and they ask me, "What is his name?" what shall I say to them?'
God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.' And he said, 'Say this to the people of Israel, "I AM has sent me to you."'
God also said to Moses, 'Say this to the people of Israel, "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 thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.'" Exodus 3:13-15

It always bothered me that the English Bible translates the tetragrammaton, YHWH, as LORD. LORD is too easily confused with lord and thus doesn't stick out to the English reader. Out of respect for God, the Hebrew people chose not to even pronounce his name. The thinking was that it was too presumptuous for fallen man to utter the sacred name of God. Since they also did not write vowels, the pronunciation of God's name was lost over time. When scribes began putting vowel pointing into the text, they took the vowels from the word adonai, which means lord, to fill out the name Yahweh.  YHWH is a proper name built on the verb that means "he is" in Hebrew. Though there is some debate on what exactly the name means, God explains this name when he gives it to Moses as "I AM WHO I AM." John Piper has a great devotional here on the meaning of the name. Some of the things the name conveys is that God has no beginning and no end, he is completely independent, indeed everything depends on him, he is the same, yesterday, today, and forever, he is the standard, and he does whatever he pleases.  I think it is fair to translate it as I AM, or HE IS, or HE WILL BE. It is interesting to me that Moses asked how he should refer to God to the people of Israel, and then the people decided that name was too sacred to use and used other names to refer to their God. God, on the other hand, uses his personal, proper name of YHWH over 1300 times in the Old Testament.  When the soldiers and priests came to arrest Jesus in the garden, Jesus asked who they were seeking. When they responded, 'Jesus of Nazareth,' he replied, 'ego eimi.' This was simply the Greek translation of I am, but it was also how the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible translated YHWH and those there to arrest him immediately recognized what he meant and fell backwards expecting fire to fall from heaven and consume him for blasphemy.

So what? Why does it matter to me how we translate this word or what we call God? I've been reading a lot in the Old Testament lately and the sheer number of times God's name is used is weighty. I've been trying to read LORD as Yahweh when I read on my own or to my kids just to impress upon us that it is the name of God and not just the word lord that we are reading. Today I tried something new when reading Psalm 11 by substituting the English translation "I AM" for YHWH. I think it makes the passage feel quite a bit different: