“This Is My Name Forever”: God’s Self-disclosure (Exodus 3:15)
August 24, 2011
In our modern world, a person’s name can be merely a label of identification; it does not reveal anything about the person. Biblical names, however, have their background in the widespread tradition that the personal name gives significant information about the one who bears it. The Old Testament consistently celebrates God’s making his name known to Israel, and the psalms again and again direct praise to God’s name (Ps. 8:1; 113:1-3; 145:1, 2; 148:5, 13). “Name” here means God himself as he has revealed himself by word and deed. At the heart of this self-revelation is the name by which he authorized Israel to invoke him, commonly rendered “the LORD” (for the Hebrew YHWH or Yahweh, as modern scholars pronounce the word)!
At a very early date in Jewish history, it came to be regarded as too sacred to pronounce YHWH so pious readers avoided pronouncing it by substituting for it the word adonay, meaning “my Lord.” When the Masoretic scholars began to supply the vowels of adonay to the consonants of YHWH, God’s name was still pronounced adonay to avoid saying Yahweh. During the Protestant Reformation, however, an attempt to transliterate this hybrid resulted in “Jehovah” since “Y” was missing from the German language and the name has remained even though it is clearly a mispronunciation of YHWH.
God declared this name to Moses when he spoke to him out of the bush that burned steadily without being consumed. God first identified himself as the God who had committed himself in covenant to the patriarchs (Gen 17:1-14); then, when Moses asked him what God’s name was (the ancients assumed that prayer would only be heard if its addressee was named correctly), God answered first “I AM WHO I AM,” then shortened it to “I AM.” The name in all its forms proclaims his eternal, self-sustaining, self-determining, sovereign reality. This is the same supernatural mode of existence that the sign of the burning bush had signified (Ex. 3:2).
Given the polytheism and pantheism of the surrounding Egyptian culture, it was essential to know the identity of the one true God. Further, in ancient cultures, to know the name of someone was to know something very essential about the person. Though Moses is apparently not familiar with God’s name, this does not mean that the personal name of God was unknown to the Hebrews prior to Moses; it may have meant that the name had been lost or had fallen into disuse during the centuries of slavery in Egypt, or that the name had not been used extensively or fully understood before this time.
At the pinnacle of Egyptian power, YHWH chose Egypt and her god-king Pharaoh as instruments to demonstrate his sovereign power over her land and her gods and Moses is chosen as Yahweh’s Messenger and Redeemer.
