Spelling Bee
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:14 NASB
I AM – Is this the biblical definition of God? Does He reveal His true essence in this conundrum of consonant/vowels? When you read “I am who I am,” what do you learn about God? Anything?
The translation of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH) as “I AM WHO I AM” is based on the Hebrew verb hāyâ, “to be.”[1] But Hebrew doesn’t use the verb “to be” in the same way we do. Note this comment:
Very seldom in the [Old Testament] is hāyâ used to denote either simple existence or the identification of a thing or person. This can be illustrated by a quick glance at almost any page of the on KJV which one will find numerous examples of words such as “is, are, was, were,” in italics, indicating that these are additions by the translators for the sake of smoothness, but not in the Hebrew itself. In such cases the Hebrew employs what is known grammatically as a nominal sentence, which we may define most simply as a sentence lacking a verb or a copula, for example: I (am) the Lord your God; the Lord (is) a sun and shield; the land (is) good; and in the [New Testament], blessed (are) the poor. This almost total lack of hāyâ as a copula or existential particle has led some to use this phenomenon as confirming evidence that “static” thought was alien to the Hebrews, the latter thinking only in “dynamic” categories.[2]
A final and brief word may be said about the meaning and interpretation of Jehovah/Yahweh. It seems beyond doubt that the name contains the verb hāyâ “to be” (but also see article YHWH). The question is whether or not it is the verb “to be” in the Qal, “He is,” or the Hiphil, “He causes to be,” a view championed by W. F. Albright. The strongest objection to this latter interpretation is that it necessitates a correction in the reading of the key text in Ex 3:14: “I am that I am.” Most likely the name should be translated something like “I am he who is,” or “I am he who exists” as reflected by the LXX’s ego eimi ho ōn. [3]
As you can see, the LXX uses Greek philosophical categories of “being” to translate the Hebrew name, categories that may not have been part of Hebrew thinking until after Hellenism invaded the Mediterranean. We should couple this with Joel Hoffman’s suggestion that YHVH is, in fact, a series of vowels, never intended to be a divine name.[4] The picture is quite blurry.
But maybe Paleo-Hebrew helps. Yes, I know, Paleo-Hebrew is reconstruction, but in this one case, the “divine name,” we actually have examples in the Dead Sea scrolls where the Paleo-Hebrew is retained. And if we look at the spelling of the “name” in this verse, we find something quite startling. It isn’t spelled Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey! It’s spelled Aleph-Hey-Vav-Hey. In other words, the translators have ignored the fact that the Tetragrammaton does not appear in this statement from God to Moses because they have assumed that YHVH is the divine name and therefore treated the odd spelling here as if it were YHVH.
As I pointed out previously,[5] the Paleo-Hebrew pictures actually say something like “Deed Reveal Secured Reveal” or as I previously noted, “Behold! The power to do.” In Paleo-Hebrew, God identifies Himself to Moses with a description something like “You will know who I am by the deeds that I do.” In other words, God is what He does—all action, all in relation to Man. It’s not a name, it’s a promise. And it’s what Moses needed to hear. God is the God of action. He will do what He says He will do. Take that back to Egypt! Heschel makes the point in a different way:
“Biblical ontology does not separate being from doing. What is, acts. The God of Israel is a God who acts, a God of mighty deeds. The Bible does not say how He is, but how He acts. It speaks of His acts of pathos and of His act in history; it is not as ‘true being’ that God is conceived, but as the semper agens. Here the basic category is action rather than immobility.”[6]
What lesson have we learned? It seems to me that we have identified two paradigm problems. The first is that our modern translations, since 1000 C.E. (the Masoretes), have incorporated Greek categories of Being into our understanding of God’s “name.” This might be a terrible mistake. The second paradigm problem is that even if we stick with the Block Script Hebrew text, we still haven’t absorbed the meanings latent in the Paleo-Hebrew text, a text which is, unfortunately, virtually lost to us. Yes, we can mechanically reproduce it, but we can never know how it was understood by the people who used it. We’re stuck with post-Babylonian Hebrew.
Topical Index: YHVH, Exodus 3:14, Joel Hoffman, Dead Sea Scrolls, I AM
[1] Johnathan Sacks translates Exodus 3:14 as, “I will be where I will be.”
[2] Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 491 הָיָה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., pp. 213–214). Chicago: Moody Press.
[3] Ibid.
[4] “ . . . why the four-letter word yhwh was chosen to represent the Hebrew God. The obvious answer is that the letters in yhwh were chosen not because of the sounds they represent, but because of their symbolic power in that they were the Hebrew’s magic vowel letters that no other culture had; yhwh has no traditional pronunciation not because the pronunciation was lost but because it never had a pronunciation to begin with. After all, the Hebrews’ great invention was the doubling up of yud (y), heh (h), and vav (w) as vowel letters. It is those exact letters that were used for God,” Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, pp. 44-45.
“ . . . the point of the tetragrammaton was not its pronunciation (for which modern letters would have been required) but rather the letters themselves. The author of the DSS, knowing that the point of the tetragrammaton was the letters, tried to preserve the old letters in their original form.” Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, p. 46.
“The solution proposed here, namely, that the letters in yhwh were chosen not for their phonetic value but because they were the Hebrew’s magic letters, accounts for everything we have seen, and even solves another problem: in addition to a lack of clear pronunciation, yhwh seems to defy any clear etymology. That is, even in form—regardless of its pronunciation of lack thereof—the word seems anomalous in Hebrew.” Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, p. 46.
“The magic-letter theory put forth here accounts for the apparent lack of etymological derivation for yhwh by specifically claiming that the word was created by the Hebrews and not borrowed from any more ancient source. What we see, then, is strong evidence that the Hebrews appreciated the value of their newly-found vowel letters so much that they used them to define membership in their group, as with Abraham, Sarah, and one name for God, and to write the other name of their God.” Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, p. 47.
[5] https://skipmoen.com/2014/04/the-most-confusing-name-on-earth/
[6] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 44.
