Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: _)aSHER_ in Ex. 3:14 (was "I AM")

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Stoney Breyer" <stoney AT touchwood.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: _)aSHER_ in Ex. 3:14 (was "I AM")
  • Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 10:41:22 -0500

As a literary scholar only just beginning the study of Hebrew, I have been fascinated by the linguistic and theological issues the participants have explored, and entertained by the fluent incivility they have indulged in. 

But would it be out of line for an outsider and amateur to suggest that everybody's missing the point? -- For instance,  Greg Stafford wrote:
Moses' question was essentially, "Who should I say sent me?" YHWH's reply
was, literally, "I will be who I will be. . . . Tell them 'I will be' sent
you." Now, it seems to me that this response means that the Israelites will
know who He is by what He *will do*.

Everything I know about storytelling tells me that this response is not a theological or theontological proposition but an irritated reaction to repeated interruption.  What the response "means" is that the Deity is annoyed.  The outburst, however, discharges the irritation which prompted it, and the Deity immediately moderates His tone and proceeds to give Moses the *real* answer: "Tell the sons of Israel 'YHWH, the god of your fathers ... has sent me to you.'  *This* is my name ... "

As for the linguistic and grammatical issues everybody's so exercised about -- this may not resolve them, but I think it marks them as irrelevant.  As I said, I'm no Hebraist; but 'ehyeh asher 'ehyeh looks an awful lot like such phrases as "che sera, sera" or "it ain't over til it's over" (consider how readily it's adopted as Popeye's colloquial motto "I yam what I yam.") I'll bet this turns out to be a catchphrase or a catchpattern which the Deity quotes and then extends, wrenching 'ehyeh syntactically and grammatically out of its context for comic and sarcastic effect.  An English example (with which I think most parents will identify) might be:

'... as I was trying to say before you interrupted me -- when we get to the campsite I want you to pitch the tent--'

'But what if it's dark!  We've been driving all day! When are we going to get there?'

'We'll get there when we get there!  It'll be here-we-are o'clock! ... Look, we're going to get in about six, it'll be plenty light, just pitch the tent, OK?'

With regard to translation, as distinct from meaning:
... "I will be who I will be" is I think impossible -- in contemporary English dialogue the full "will" is almost never used except emphatically, either to affirm what has previously been explicitly or implicitly denied or to assert a future different from the present.  I cannot believe that either of these meanings obtains here:

*I will be who I will be (though you don't think so).
*I will be who I will be (though I'm somebody else now).

It may be also used unemphatically to mark discourse as more "formal" than "colloquial" -- but I think this usage contradicts the dramatic situation I have described. 

... Either "I'll be who I'll be" or "I am who I am" is colloquially acceptable.  I incline towards "I am" because Moses' isn't asking who the Deity *will* be at the time the sons of Israel raise the question but who He *was* at the time He commissioned Moses -- which *is* now, when the Deity is speaking.  But it actually makes very little difference, since there is strictly speaking no distinction between present and future tense in English verbs.

Stoney Breyer
Writer, Touchwood, Inc.



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page