Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bearpecs AT aol.com]

I would like to share the following three references related to Ex. 3:14.  (I 
have not attempted to recreate the diacritical marks of the scholarly 
tranliterations.  I have however shown “s” with the diacritical mark for 
shin as “sh”.  Nor have I shown italics.  It is my practice to use a dash to 
avoid writing G-d in full, and to use periods in between the letters of the 
tetragrammaton.)
 
_Exodus 1-18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commenatary_ by William 
H.C. Propp (The Anchor Bible: Doubleday, 1999), p. 204:
Hebrew expresses “I am X,” however, with a nonverbal sentence (e.g. ‘anoki 
y-hwe[h] ‘I am Y-hweh’). The imperfect of hyy always refers to the future 
(Abba 1961: 324; deVaux 1970: 66)….  
 
 
_Commentary on the Torah: with a New English Translation and the Hebrew Text_ 
by Richard Elliott Friedman (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p.178:
I am who I am.  (Or:“I shall be who I shall be.”  The imperfect verb here is 
not limited to present or future time.) 
 
 
_The Five Books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and 
Deutoronomy:  A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes_  
by Everett Fox (The Schocken Bible: Volume I, Schocken Books, 1995), p. 273:
G-d said to Moshe:
EHYEH ASHER EHYEH/ I will be-there howsoever I willbe-there.
And he said: 
Thus shall you say to the Children of Israel:
EHYEH/ I-WILL-BE_THERE sends me to you.
pp. 268-270:
When Moshe asks G-d for his name in 3:13, he asks for more than a title 
(Buber and Rosenzweig, 1994). In the context of Egyptian magic, knowing the 
true name of a person or a god meant that one could coerce him, or at the 
very least understand his true essence.  Moshe foresees that the slaves will 
want to be able to call on this power that has promised to deliver them.
G-d’s answer is one of the most enigmatic and widely debated statements in 
the Hebrew Bible (the reader will want to consult Childs for a full 
bibliography).  What does ehyeh asher ehyeh mean?  One’s suspicions are 
aroused from the outset, for the answer is alliterative and hence already not 
easy to pin down; the poetics of the phrase indicate both importance and 
vagueness or mystery.  There is some scholarly consensus that the name may 
mean “He who causes (things) to be” or perhaps “He who is.”  Buber and 
Rosenzweig, taking an entirely different tack (of which one occasionally 
finds echoes in the scholarly literature), interpret the verb hayoh as 
signifying presence, “being there,” and hence see G-d’s words as a real 
answer to the Israelites’ imagined question – an assurance of his presence. 
The B-R interpretation has been retained here, out of a desire to follow them 
on at least this significant point of theology, and out of my feeling that it 
also fits the smaller context.  For of the several times that Moshe tries to 
wriggle out of his mission, G-d answers him all but once with the same verb, 
in the same meaning: “I will be-there with you” (note the parallel between 
Moshe and the people again).
It is, however, also possible that ehyeh asher ehyeh is a deliberately vague 
phrase, whose purpose is antimagical and an attempt to evade the question 
(Rosenzweig speaks of this as well), as if to suggest that possession of the 
true name cannot be used to coerce this G-d.  In this interpretation, it 
would follow that, just as G-d is magicless (see v.20), he is nameless, at 
least in the conventional sense of religion.