Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

  Harold,

  The explanation of the meaning YHWH  in verse 14 is:
 "I AM ('ehyeh) WHAT I AM ('ehyeh)", ... ('ehyeh) I AM 
 has sent me to you." These verbs are all given in the
 standard biblical verb HYH  for 'to be' . The biblical
 commentator could have used the verb HWH here, but
 did not.

 One possible explanation is that when the need arose
 to understand the deity's name, its root HWH has become
 archaic, and the author used the current verb HYH to
 explain it.

 Thus an argument can be made that by the time the
 explanation was given, the original meaning had been
 forgotten. But this is a different subject.

  Uri Hurwitz


13  And Moses said to God, When I come to the children of Israel and say 
to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you: and they say to me, 
What is his name? what am I to say to them?
14 And God said to him, I AM WHAT I AM: and he said, Say to the children 
of Israel, I AM has sent me to you. 15 And God went on to say to Moses, 
Say to the children of Israel, The Lord, the God of your fathers, the 
God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my 
name for ever, and this is my sign to all generations.

HH: The English could be obscuring a bit what is happening in the text. 
The form of the verb is the same in several instances, and it is a form 
that can also mean "I will be." It occurs in verse 12: "Truly, I will be 
('ehyeh) with you. Then it occurs in verse 14: "I AM ('ehyeh) WHAT I AM 
('ehyeh)." "Say to the children of Israel, I AM ('ehyeh) has sent me to 
you." So one could translate "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE." But the Hebrew 
could convey both the present or the future, and the translator felt 
that the present has some implications that the future does not (God 
does not only exist in the future).

Yours,
Harold

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