Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi all,

we've had this discussion many times and the discussion usually revolves
around discussions of tense and aspect and that kind of grammatical baggage
we like to use when deciding on a 'good translation'. However, my personal
feeling that this is a discussion which can only be resolved by referring to
semantics and pragmatics. That is to say we need to ask the questions:

a) What did this semantic unit most likely mean?
b) What theory does the contextual evidence support?

In order to answer this question I would like to pose the following
question. Imagine you are English and for some strange reason your name is
"I'm" and then out of the blue somebody comes up to you and says "Could you
introduce yourself please?". How would you do it in the confines of the
English language. One of the most likely, and yet obscure, natural language
productions is:

I'm I'm

where the effect of the first "I'm" is that of introducing oneself and the
effect of the second "I'm" is that of saying your name. Could it be that we
see a similar pattern in the Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh? Could it be that
ehyeh asher is simply introducing oneself and that the second ehyeh was his
name. The context certainly seems to support this view as further on in the
context the name is repeated but this time as simply 'ehyeh' and not 'ehyeh
asher ehyeh'. So that's the pragmatics. Now onto the semantics:

If we are to accept the theory that the construction 'ehyeh asher ...' is
communicating a name to follow and the name is 'ehyeh' then we get onto
considering the semantic significance of the name. As has often been argued
this is tenseless verb form with imperfective aspect. Something that is
ongoing and not limited to any time frame of past, present or future. For
this reason all of 'I was', 'I am', and 'I will be' seem to fail in some
way. Of all of them perhaps 'I am' is best because even though it is
strictly a present tense form it is often used with imperfective semantics:

a) I am a man (this isn't likely to change anytime soon)
b) I am a carpenter (has been, is and most likely will be)

It is perhaps for these reasons that the LXX translates the second ehyeh as
'O WN' in an attempt to indicate some kind of tenseless permanence.
Personally, I find it interesting to compare how revelations calls God the
one who was, who is and who is coming indicating some kind of
everlastingness existing in the past, the present and in the future. For me,
this is what the name of God means. It is perhaps with this motivation that
one translation has it as "I am the Eternal". I quite like this translation.
It seems to be the only one that abandons grammatical translation giving
priority to semantics.

James Christian