The Name

Moses is keeping someone else's sheep at the far side of the wilderness when he turns aside to look at a bush that burns without being consumed. The Hebrew for bush is seneh, one consonant away from Sinai, and the narrator is unlikely to have missed it. The mountain where God will give the covenant is already, quietly, in the word.

God's self-introduction in verse 6 is genealogical before it is metaphysical: the God of your father, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. Then verses 7 to 9 stack the verbs from the end of chapter 2 and add one more: I have indeed seen, I have heard, I am aware of their sufferings (the Hebrew verb is yada, know, the last verb of 2:25), and I have come down to rescue. The commission follows in verse 10, and it lands on Moses as a demand rather than a comfort.

Moses raises five objections across two chapters, and the first is the honest one: 'Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?' (3:11). Notice that God does not answer it. He does not tell Moses he is capable, or chosen for his gifts, or the right man for the moment. He says, 'I will surely be with you' (ki ehyeh immak). The question about Moses is answered by a statement about God, and the sign offered in verse 12 is no help in advance at all: you will worship God on this mountain, which can only be verified after the obedience it is meant to support.

The second objection is the one that opens the book's theology. Suppose they ask his name, what should I tell them? In the ancient Near East a name was not a label but a handle. To know the name of a god was to know how to invoke him, and invocation was leverage. Moses is asking for something usable.

The answer is ehyeh asher ehyeh, three words built on the verb to be, and the traditional English rendering 'I AM WHO I AM' is only one of several defensible translations. The BSB itself says so in a footnote at this verse: 'Or I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE'. Hebrew has no present tense of this verb in the form used; ehyeh is imperfect, which covers ongoing and future action as readily as present. Four readings are live.

First, being itself. The Septuagint translated it ego eimi ho on, 'I am the one who is', and that reading carried into the classical Christian doctrine of God as self-existent, dependent on nothing. Augustine and Aquinas both build here.

Second, presence in action. Read the imperfect as future: 'I will be who I will be' (the BSB footnote has 'what' for 'who'), or, as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig rendered it, roughly 'I will be there as the one who will be there'. On this reading the name answers the situation rather than describing an attribute. Israel is not being told that God exists; they are being told he will show up. The immediate context supports this, because ehyeh has just been used two verses earlier in exactly that sense: I will be with you.

Third, causation. Some Semitists, notably William Albright and Frank Moore Cross, argued the form is originally causative: 'he causes to be', making the name a creator formula. It requires revocalising the Hebrew, which its critics count against it; the passage does not require it.

Fourth, refusal. A sentence is not a handle. Moses asks for a name and receives a clause that circles back on itself, and several readers across the tradition have heard deliberate evasion in that: this God will not be reduced to a term you can deploy. Verse 15 then does give a usable name, the four consonants YHWH, and ties it to the fathers.

About those four letters. Jewish practice, out of reverence, reads Adonai, my Lord, in place of the name, which is why English Bibles print LORD in small capitals. The hybrid 'Jehovah' comes from medieval Christian scholars reading the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of Adonai, a misunderstanding rather than a pronunciation. 'Yahweh' is a scholarly reconstruction, probable but not certain. And the same verse calls the name God's zeker, his memorial or remembrance, from zakar, the verb that moved the plot at the end of chapter 2.

Three chapters later God says something that has occupied scholarship for two centuries: 'I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by My name the LORD I did not make Myself known to them' (6:3). The phrase translated God Almighty is El Shaddai in Hebrew. The difficulty is plain. Genesis uses the name YHWH constantly, from the garden onward, and Genesis 4:26 says that in the days of Enosh people began to call on it.

The source-critical answer is the strongest version of the case for reading the Pentateuch as a composite. On this account different strands of tradition handled the name differently: one used YHWH from creation, while others held that it was first disclosed to Moses, and a later editor preserved both rather than smoothing them. This is not an arbitrary theory. It explains a real pattern that runs through many chapters and correlates with other features of style and interest, and it has held a central place in the field since the nineteenth century for that reason.

The alternative readings are also serious. One takes 'know' in its full biblical sense of experience rather than information: the patriarchs heard the name but did not know the reality it names, because they never saw the covenant keeper act at this scale. The verse then contrasts two orders of acquaintance, not two vocabularies. A second proposal reads the Hebrew as a rhetorical question, 'and by my name YHWH was I not known to them?' (this lesson's own rendering of the Hebrew), which the grammar allows though it is not the natural reading. A third holds that the narrator of Genesis uses the later, revealed name throughout for the reader's clarity, the way a biography may call a man by the title he only received at forty.

A student should be able to state each of these in the form its best defender would recognise, and should notice what they have in common: all of them are trying to account for the same observable feature of the text. Disagreement here is not disagreement about whether the text says something odd. It says something odd. The argument is about why.

The remaining objections are worth reading for their realism. Moses says they will not believe him, and is given three signs. He says he is not eloquent, kevad peh, heavy of mouth, the same root that will describe Pharaoh's heavy heart. He finally drops the arguments and says simply: send someone else. The LORD's anger burns, and the accommodation is Aaron.

Then comes one of the strangest passages in the Torah. On the road back to Egypt, at a lodging place, 'the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him'. Zipporah circumcises their son, touches him with the foreskin, and says, 'Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me' (4:24-26). Notice that the BSB has made a decision here: where it prints 'Moses' and 'Moses' feet', its own footnotes say the Hebrew has only 'him' and 'his feet'. The Hebrew never says whom the LORD sought to kill, and the text leaves open whether it was Moses or his son. The ritual logic is not explained, and no reading commands consensus. The most that should be claimed is the connection the placement suggests: the man commissioned to demand that Pharaoh release God's firstborn son has not applied the covenant sign to his own, and blood saves a life at a lodging place eight chapters before it will do so again in every Israelite house in Egypt.

A teacher's temptation with a passage like this is to supply confidence the text withholds. Resist it. Tell your students what is clear, tell them what is not, and let the obscurity stand as evidence that these narratives were not smoothed for our convenience.