Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Hayyim,

I discovered a typo in my previous post. Ethiopic perfect 3. p. s. m. is 
written NAGARA  and not NAGARU.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo
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.> Exodus 3: 15  "This is my Name forever"

The author of  Torah, unlike Faulkner, did not customarily refer to
antecedents few dozen  words apart. It does not seem likely to me that shmi
refers to yhwh. I think,  shmi rather relates to "God of Abraham, etc." And
such designation is  meaningful - ancestral God.

Besides, Moses never told Hebrews the name he  asked for. Thus, evidently, he
got no reply, and ehye asher ehye is idiomatic  refusal to state the name.

Vadim Cherny

If I may  return once more to the issue of ehye asher ehye, I think  Vadim
Cherny (above) hit the nail on the head. However, it is not so much an
idiomatic refusal as the impossibility of stating a name for a deity which  
is the
"wholly other" and cannot be expressed by or reduced to a name  as is the case
with mortals or even functional gods - the kind of gods Moses was  familiar 
with
- hence his was a normal question. All this deity can reveal about  its
ineffable Self is its eternal BEING, i.e. it IS and will BE. All else  is 
beyond
human comprehension.

These passages have all the elements of the numinous as categorized by
Rudolph Otto. The fascinosum in Moses' attraction to the burning bush, the
tremendum in the caution for distance, removal of shoes, holy ground - and, if
course, the mysterium in the enigmatic ehye asher ehye.

(Another consideration: Names could be used for magical manipulations,  hence
the prohibition on uttering HaShem).

Shoshanna, Vadim Cherny does not contradict the Torah (Chumash) nor claims
to know better than the Rambam or Rashi.He merely differentiates  between the
Tanach and Rabbinics.

Doris