Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh

Ehyeh asher ehyeh (Exodus 3:14): God’s “Narrative Identity” among Suspense, Curiosity, and Surprise

Jean-Pierre SonnetGregorian University, Theology

Abstract God’s enigmatic answer to Moses’ question about his name—Ehyeh asher ehyeh, usually translated “I am who I am” (Exod. 3:14)—has provoked philologi-cal analysis for centuries, often coupled with high philosophical and theological reflection; yet little attention has been paid to the narrative relevance of God’s self-designation in the context of the book of Exodus. The article investigates the nar-rative potential of God’s revealed name along the threefold movement of suspense, curiosity, and surprise. The attention to the syntactic, semantic, rhetorical, and nar-rative aspects of God’s name in itself and within its immediate context is interrelated with the tracking of suspense, curiosity, and surprise dynamics triggered by God’s name in the book of Exodus as a whole. The fine and multiplied dynamism of God’s self-naming phrase, it is shown, turns the Exodus narrative into the embodiment of God’s name and into the crucible of God’s narrative identity.

In his essay Poésie et pensée abstraite, Paul Valéry observed that it is only the speed with which we pass over words that allows us to understand them at all. Pause long enough upon even the simplest word (consider its etymology, for instance), and “it changes into an enigma, an abyss, a torment to thought.” The names in biblical narratives force us, with their disjunctive glosses, to enter this abyss.Herbert Marks, “Biblical Naming and Poetic Etymology,” 1995

Poetics Today 31:2 (Summer 2010) doi 10.1215/03335372-2009-023© 2010 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

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“A character, first of all,” William H. Gass (1970: 49) maintains, “is the noise of his name, and all the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him.” Between a character’s name and the surrounding narrative, an intricate relation can be observed, especially in ancient literature. Names beget narrative, and narrative begets names.� In the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, the name of the wise Ūta-napišti—“He reached life”—underlies the unfolding of the plot: reaching the faraway Ūta-napišti, who will show him where to find the plant of life, becomes the ultimate goal of Gilga-mesh’s quest for immortality.� Similarly, in archaic Greek poetry the name of Achilles (Achilleus), the main character of the Iliad, matches his role in the epic: Achilles is the one who brings about achos, “grief,” to his laos, the “people” of the Achaeans (see Nagy 1999 [1979]: 68–69). In biblical nar-rative the link between name and plot is pervasive;� suffice it to mention the bearing of Ishmael’s, Isaac’s, and Jacob’s names on the plot of Genesis. The play on Isaac’s name (יצחק, “He will laugh”) is well known: it stretches from Sara’s skeptical laughter in the annunciation scene (Gen. 18:12–14) to her humorous conclusion after the birth of the child (“God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me” [Gen. 21:6]). The meaning of Ishmael’s name ,ישמעאל) “God hears”) is brought into play three times in the story by God or his angel: while helping his mother, Hagar (“You shall name him Ishmael, for Yhwh has heard [שמע] of your misery” [Gen. 16:11]), then in support of Abraham, his father (“And as for Ishmael, I have heard you [ולישמעאל שמעתיך]” [Gen. 17:20]), and finally on account of the child himself (“God has heard [וישמע] the boy crying as he lies there” [Gen. 21:17]). The process goes even further in the next genera-tion, that is, in Jacob’s story. As in the cases of Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob’s name (יעקב) is a key to the narrative: it connects the hero’s tricky birth in Genesis 25:26, gripping his brother’s heel ,(עקב) and his tricky deal-ings in regard to Esau’s birthright and benediction (עקב, “to supplant”; see Gen. 27:36). Yet the name of the third patriarch is also deconstructed and reconstructed in Genesis 32–33 in the narrative of Jacob wrestling with the mysterious Other and of the brothers’ reunion. Mixed up with the words ,(”to be dislocated“) יקע ,(”to wrestle, rolling in dust“) אבק ,(Yabboq) יבקand חבק (“to embrace”), Jacob’s name undergoes a semantic recasting, which expresses the hero’s new birth.

1. Kermode 1979: 91 serves as the basis for my sentence.2. About Ūta-napišti’s name and his role in the growth of the Epic of Gilgamesh, starting with the Old Babylonian version, see Tigay 1982: 49, 237–38. The meaning of Ūta-napišti’s name is echoed in the Sumerian equivalent Ziusudra, which combines the elements “life,” “days,” and “to be distant” or “to prolong.”3. See the surveys by Strus (1978) and Garsiel (1991); see also the essay by Marks (1995).

Sonnet • God’s “Narrative Identity” among Suspense, Curiosity, and Surprise 333

But what about God’s own name, revealed in Exodus 3:14, אהיה אשר אהיה (henceforth Ehyeh asher ehyeh)? Is it invested with a similar narrative rele-vance? The revelation of the name is embedded in the burning bush epi-sode (Exod. 3:1–15) and is itself a kind of semantic firebrand. Having heard the cry of the sons of Israel oppressed in Egypt, God appears to Moses, who has fled from Egypt after an unhappy intervention on behalf of his Israelite brethren. The deity’s self-identification in the bush (“I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” [Exod. 3:6]) as well as his promise to liberate the enslaved people prompt Moses to enquire:

13Suppose I come to the sons 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 shall I say to them? 14God said to Moses, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. And he said, thus shall you say to the sons of Israel, Ehyeh has sent me to you. 15And God further said to Moses, Thus shall you say to the sons of Israel, Yhwh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my name forever, and this my remembrance for all generations. (Exod. 3:13–15)

God’s enigmatic answer to Moses, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, has provoked philo-logical analysis for centuries, often coupled with high philosophical and theological reflection; yet relatively little attention has been paid to the narrative relevance of God’s self-designation in the context of Exodus. Would this name be an exception to the rule of name-and-narrative inter-linkage, and this in a book where God plays a leading role if not the lead-ing role? Samuel R. Driver has described the Ehyeh asher ehyeh utterance as an example of idem per idem phrases, used by the characters “where the means, or the desire, to be more explicit does not exist” (1911: 362–63; see also 1913: 185–86).� Yet implicitness or elusiveness in the answer does not amount to a refusal to answer, the way many commentators have read Exodus 3:14.� This essay will, on the contrary, consider the positive import

4. In Ogden’s (1992: 107) definition, “the idem per idem consists of a verb in the principal clause repeated in the subordinate clause, and linked by some form of the so-called rela-tive pronoun. The number and person of the subject in the main clause is mirrored in the attached relative clause. Furthermore, the repeated verb has the same sense in both clauses, thus distinguishing it from the paronomasia, in which similarities of form do not have the same sense.” Idem per idem constructions are generally recognized in Gen. 43:14; Exod. 3:14, 4:13, 16:23 (“bake what you [want to] bake and boil what [you want] to boil”), 33:19; 1 Sam. 23:13 (“they wandered wherever they wandered”); 2 Sam. 15:20; 2 Kings 8:1; Ezek. 15:25; and Esther 4:16 (“If I am to perish, I shall perish”).5. They understand God’s answer in Exod. 3:14 in the light of the divine evasions in Gen. 32:30 and Judg. 13:18 and so as a refusal (see Arnold 1905: 129; Dubarle 1951; von Rad 1962: 182; de Vaux 1970: 64–65; Propp 1998: 226).


of God’s elusiveness,� emphasizing its productive rhetorical function in the narrative. Terseness in the answer can of course be invested with various rhetorical functions.� Jack R. Lundbom (1978: 194–95), for instance, main-tains that, in Exodus 3:14 as elsewhere in the Bible, the idem per idem for-mula is a “closure device,” invariably used to “terminate debate.” In these pages I will suggest that the peculiar function of God’s name in Exodus 3:14 is rather to initiate narrative. The Ehyeh asher ehyeh utterance, I intend to show, has a subtle affinity with what Meir Sternberg has called the three universals of narrative—suspense, curiosity, and surprise. The play of these three forces is, in Stern-berg’s view, what turns a communication into a narrative. Suspense “derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future” (Sternberg 1978: 65); curiosity “is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past” (ibid.); and surprise springs out of the unexpected disclosure of significant information, the lack of which had not even been noticed by the reader (Sternberg 2001: 117).� The narrative context of Exodus 3:14 is loaded with suspense, curiosity, and surprise, and the three dynamics, set in motion by the narrator, find in the Ehyeh asher ehyeh phrase both a matrix and a seman-tic catalyst. In this process, each of the dynamics exploits various meanings (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and rhetorical) of the expression. These include: • the play between the stative (“to be”) and active (“to happen,” “to

befall”) aspects of the verb היה, which opens and closes Ehyeh asher ehyeh;

• the temporal bearing of the imperfect form ehyeh, which spans the past and present, with recurrent and durative overtones, as well as the future;�

6. Following Childs (1974: 76), who believes that “the formula is paradoxically both an answer and a refusal of an answer”; compare Abba 1961: 325–26.7. When they bear upon the construction of a character, initial implicitness and elusiveness are not experienced as a dead end. Since narrative is “saturated with purposiveness,” Price (1983: 20–21) writes, “the reader is ready to accept a greater measure of apparent irrelevancy and to wait for implicit connectedness to be revealed in the process of unfolding.”8. According to Sternberg (1999: 529), narrativity can be defined “as the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form).” Along the same functional lines, Sternberg (ibid.) defines “narrative as a discourse where such play dominates: narrativity then ascends from a possibly marginal or secondary role . . . to the status of regulating prin-ciple, first among the priorities of telling/reading.” For a general presentation of the working of the three universals in biblical context, see Sternberg 1985: 264–320.9. See Joüon and Muraoka 2006: § 111 i; Ogden 1971: 456–58; and the excursus in Fischer 1989: 147–54. In Brichto’s (1992a: 24) view, the temporal determination of the expression is


• the gamut of modal uses attached to the yiqtol conjugation of ehyeh (capability, possibility, deliberation, obligation, desire) (see Waltke and O’Connor 1990: § 31.4);

• the dialectic between the verb ehyeh as event or process and the con-nective asher as a reference to personal or thematic identity (who, what) (see LaCoque and Ricoeur 1998: 316, 324);

• the rhetorical value of the idem per idem construction, conveying either indeterminacy or intensification (see Vriezen 1950);

• the illocutionary force of the sentence, (contextually) established as either assertion or promise.

The Ehyeh asher ehyeh utterance, William M. Schniedewind (2009: 82) con-tends, is “an intentionally ambiguous answer”; yet ambiguity, I would argue, is not introduced here for its own sake. Thanks to its finely gauged polysemy, the sentence activates the most basic and most powerful narra-tive interests.

Suspense

“In art as in life, suspense derives from incomplete knowledge about a conflict (or some other contingency) looming in the future. Located at some point in the present, we know enough to expect a struggle but not to predict its course, and above all its outcome, with certitude” (Sternberg 1985: 264). Caught between hope and fear, we keep reading, building, and refining rival scenarios for the future at various points in the narrative. The revelation of God’s name in Exodus 3 occurs in a context filled with suspense: who will have the upper hand? Pharaoh in his ethnic cleansing or God in his response to the people’s cry? Even more urgently, how will Moses answer the inconceivable call just addressed to him? “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt,” Moses asks (Exod. 3:11); “I will be (אהיה) with you” (Exod. 3:12), God answers, voicing the first ehyeh in Exodus and setting the suspense on a new track. Two verses later, in spelling out his name, God takes up this initial answer and turns it into an open-ended formula, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, which relaunches and generalizes the suspense track. Under the pressure of con-textual suspense, the phrase yields a first meaning—“I will be what I will be”—that itself functions as a suspense catalyst. Thus the sentence makes

as manifold as the combinations of its elements: “Its meaning is . . . all of the following: I am what I am, I am what I was, I am what I shall be, I was what I am, I was what I was, I was what I shall be, I shall be what I was, I shall be what I am, I shall be what I shall be” (see also Brichto 1992b: 274n24).


the most of the imperfect as a way to refer to the future�0 and of the idem per idem construction as an expression of indeterminacy. God will be what-ever he wants to be, and his sovereignty in this eventful future is akin to the modal determinations that lurk in the self-naming formula: “I can/may/want to be what I can/may/want to be.” In its open-endedness, God’s elu-sive name thus preserves God’s freedom in history and thwarts the magic or idolatrous power attached to a graspable or manageable divine name. Since the formula elaborates on a previous “I will be with you” (Exod. 3:12), in a context of promised assistance and deliverance (Exod. 3:7–10), the utterance is to be taken as a (speech act of ) promise, implying God’s benevolence in interventions to come.�� It is Yhwh’s way to open an event-ful future of unpredictable yet assured divine assistance,�� and the dialectic that holds together providence and unpredictability precisely constitutes the heart of suspense when it comes to the biblical God. So it is in Exodus 4, where successive divine utterances of ehyeh match the progressive complication of the plot. “I will be (ehyeh) with you,” God had said to Moses in Exodus 3:12. The prophet’s obstructive game in chap-ter 4—“I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exod. 4:10)—prompts God to adjust the wording to “I will be (ehyeh) with your mouth” (Exod. 4:12). Moses’ answer in Exodus 4:13 implies a kind of boomerang effect in emulating God’s idem per idem sentence: “Please, Yhwh, send by the hand of whom you will send תשלח) ביד־ נא in—”(שלח־ other words, don’t send me (see Volgger 1999: 32–33). The answer does not discourage God, who modulates his ehyeh once more, throwing in Aaron’s mediation in the pro-cess: “I will be (ehyeh) with your mouth and with his mouth” (Exod. 4:15). In this stretch of dialogue, the suspense track—how will the assistance prom-ised to Moses be implemented if Moses himself resists God’s way?—is thus gradually relaunched and redirected by God’s answers to the reluctant prophet. God’s progressively reformulated promise of assistance reorients the future of the action and reshapes Moses’ and the reader’s expectations about the how and the when of God’s actual support. In Exodus, as in any narrative, it is the narrator’s task to orchestrate

10. See Aquila’s and Theodotion’s rendering (esomai hos esomai, “I will be who I will be”). About this “opening toward the future,” see especially Gese 1975: 81–82; also see Wambacq 1978: 335–38. One could add that the narrative perspective, open to the future, is then par-ticularly akin to the active aspect of the verb היה: God’s “being” is open to determinations and events that will possibly “happen.”11. Promises, as noted by Searle (1969: 57), commit the speaker to some future course of action and one in favor of the interlocutor (as against the threat: “a promise is a pledge to do something for you, not to you; but a threat is a pledge to do something to you, not for you” [ibid.: 59]).12. See the Midrash on this point (Freedman 1939: 64–65, III.6) and, recently, the emphasis on God’s “Freiheit und Unverfügbarkeit” in Fischer and Markl 2009: 54.


the suspense produced by the action. The revelation of God’s name, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, however, makes it clear that in Exodus the first master of sus-pense is God himself, and the narrator is just following the story’s main character in that matter. Although omniscient and capable of anticipating God’s intention in future interventions (see the comment in 2 Sam. 17:15), the narrator refrains from doing so. “The master of biblical discourse,” Sternberg (1990: 83) writes, “waits on the lord of biblical reality, as if the narrator’s shaping must take its cue from God’s forwarding of plot.” The first and last words of suspense do not originate in the complications cre-ated by human freedom (in either camp) nor in the art of the narrator.�� It is God who stamps the contingencies, delays, and predicaments of human history with the rhythm of his assistance. The narrator emulates in story-telling what the unpredictable yet faithful God creates in history.

Curiosity

“Unlike suspense . . . curiosity bears on things past relative to the moment of their becoming of interest. . . . The question relates to an accomplished fact in the world: an incident, relationship, motive, character trait, plot logic, which has already played some part in the determining of the nar-rative present” (Sternberg 1985: 283). The dynamics of curiosity impel the reader forward while looking backward: “Knowing that we do not know, we go forward with our mind on the gapped antecedents, trying to infer (bridge, compose) them in retrospect” (Sternberg 2001: 117). The revelation of the name in Exodus 3 occurs in a plot that is oriented toward the past as well as toward the future. The turning point in the oppression story told in chapters 1 and 2 occurs when God, hearing the cry of the people, “remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Exod. 2:24). Similarly, in his self-presentation to Moses at the burning bush, God refers to a previous story: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3:6). The God of the bush has his credentials in the past. For Moses, those elliptical allusions prompt immediate curiosity: What God? Why this tying of his own father to the patriarchs? And why is he himself inserted (“your father”) into the sequence, given the people’s and his own situation?

13. Surveying the “pros and cons of suspense in the Bible,” Sternberg (1985: 267) writes: “Clearly, the generation of suspense throughout the tale would militate against our sense of the divine control of history: to alternate between hope and fear is to postulate a world of divine laissez-faire, of natural contingency or, perhaps worse, of contingency subject to the regulation of art alone.” The Ehyeh asher ehyeh announcement thwarts such a theological drift, putting forward God’s overarching involvement in the (suspense) plot of Exodus.


Now God’s revealed name encapsulates and intensifies this dynamics of curiosity as well, since the repeated ehyeh can have an iterative or habitual aspect, and an alternative translation is, then, as proposed by Driver (1911: 40–41): “I am wont to be what I am wont to be.”�� In such a case, as Corne-lis Den Hertog (2002: 226) writes, the yiqtol verb form “will serve to bridge the gap between . . . two times . . . : the time of the ancestors and that of Moses.” God’s revelation at the burning bush is not only the extension of a temporal line already drawn in the sequence of the patriarchs (see Exod. 3:6), it is also the disclosure of a working analogy: God will reassert him-self in present history as he did in the patriarchal past. If the connection between these two divine historical assertions is bewildering for Moses, it equally puzzles the reader, who wonders about the forms of God’s claimed consistency throughout time. God’s formula is totally elliptical in that mat-ter, and the narrator refrains from adding any clue to the divine conun-drum. “The withholding of information about the past,” Sternberg (1985: 259) writes, “at once stimulates the reader’s curiosity about the action, the agents, their life and relation below the surface.” In other words, the divine formula triggers retrospection (via curiosity) as much as it triggers pro-spection (via suspense), and it prompts the reader to probe God’s persis-tence, which bridges ancient and present history. The reference to the past, however, somehow depends on the illocu-tionary force of God’s self-naming phrase. Understood as a reference to God’s persistent way of being throughout the ages, God’s utterance is, in terms of illocutionary force, an assertion. Yet the phenomenon of indirect speech act is common in biblical Hebrew, as in any natural language, and the assertion in question looks very much like an indirect act of promise.�� In affirming his consistency throughout time, God subtly makes a promise: he will act favorably in the future for the sake of his people, as he habitually did in the past for the sake of the patriarchs.�� For Moses, as I said, the elliptical reference to the God of the fathers is a source of curiosity, and so is God’s self-naming phrase for both Moses and the reader, insofar as the formula leaves undefined the habitual ways

14. Driver eventually abandons this rendering in favor of a translation in the future tense—without argumentation, however. See also Jacob 1992: 73. On Jacob’s engagement in the exegesis of God’s name(s), see Marks 2002.15. See Searle 1975. On speech acts and indirect speech acts in the Hebrew Bible, see, for instance, Jackson 2000: 42–69.16. Hence Niccacci’s (1985) proposal to construe the phrase as “I will be who I have been,” establishing a tight equivalence between the God of the fathers and the God of the sons. Niccacci refers to the following midrashic tradition, among others: “R. Isaac said: God said to Moses: ‘Tell them that I am now what I always was and always will be’; for this reason is the word ehyeh written three times [in Exod. 3:12–14]” (Freedman 1939: 64–65, III.6).


of God’s assistance. In the opening chapter of the book, the fates of the sons of Jacob have been related to successive Egyptian kings, not to Israel’s deity. Reading Exodus thus implies a kind of “remembrance of things past,” where things progressively surface, as in Exodus 6:8, when God reminds Moses: “I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am Yhwh.” At this point, God elaborates on his previous announcement in Exodus 3:8 about the people’s entry into the land and provides this entry with its appropriate rationale. Yet it is surprisingly Moses who brings remembering to its peak in Exodus 32. After the people’s sin of idolatry in the golden calf affair, God says to his prophet: “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them” (Exod. 32:10). Moses, how-ever, seems to understand God’s request to refrain from intervening as an invitation to intervene,�� and the prophet daringly reminds God of his own commitment to the people in question: “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever’” (Exod. 32:13; cf. 33:1). The God who remembered the covenant (in Exod. 2:24) has to be reminded of it, not without benefit to the reader, who can thus put together the crucial pieces of the past. Yet Exodus progresses as a wheel within a larger wheel, that of the Pen-tateuch, and, as Rashi, the eleventh-century exegete, has observed, Gene-sis serves as narrative prologue (or exposition) to Exodus.�� What the reader of Exodus has to remember is what he or she has already read in Genesis, and in retrospect God’s name thus extends its heuristic virtue to the first book of the Pentateuch. On that scale, the self-naming phrase “I am wont to be what I am wont to be” operates as a reminder and activates analo-gies between God’s conduct then and now, there and here. God’s promise to Moses in Exodus 3:12, “I will be (ehyeh) with you,” for instance, gains a powerful rationale when related to God’s foundational commitments to Isaac and Jacob, “And I will be (ehyeh) with you” (Gen. 26:3 and 31:3), in relation to the oath sworn to Abraham.�� What was left implicit—God’s

17. “Scholars, both Jewish and Christian,” Tiemeyer (2006: 195) writes, “have long sus-pected that the deeper message of the passage is not to ban intercession but to encourage it. In requesting to be left alone, God is in fact wishing the very opposite. In other words, by declaring his desire to destroy Israel, God gives Moses a reason to intercede, and by the words ‘leave me alone’ informs Moses that he had the power to hinder God from executing his threats.”18. See Rashi’s comment on Gen. 1:1; cf. Signer 1997: 110.19. See Janzen 1993: 99–100 on the relationship between these promises in Genesis and the revelation of God’s name in Exodus.


credentials in the past—is progressively made explicit by the surfacing of the past. Curiosity in any narrative is engineered by the narrator. It is the master of the tale who creates gaps, obscuring decisive elements of the past, and who effects in the reader’s mind a continuous backward elucidation. Yet in Exodus the impetus for such an interest in the lessons of the past is equally and most authoritatively launched by a character in the narrated world, that is, by the God whose name (also) means “I am wont to be what I am wont to be.”

Surprise

Whereas in suspense and curiosity we know that we do not know and we want to know, in the case of surprise we do not, and we are therefore unsettled by what we come to know. “The production of surprise,” Stern-berg (1985: 309) writes, “depends on the reader’s being lured into a false certitude of knowledge” in such a way that “the gap will surface only at the moment of its filling.” The revelation of God’s name in Exodus 3 indeed produces surprise, for the reader was expecting another name. Up to that point in Exodus, the narrator has thrice used God’s name—the Yhwh tetragrammaton—impressing it on the reader’s mind (Exod. 3:2.4.7). As a reader of Genesis, the same reader also knows that the name in question circulates in the characters’ world as a divine appellation warranted by antiquity—it was used by humankind at the dawn of history, as early as Seth and Enosh in Genesis 4:26, by all three patriarchs,�0 and what is more, by God himself (in his self-presentations to Abraham in Genesis 15:7 and to Jacob in Gene-sis 28:13). The tetragrammaton is thus, we surmise, the token or the shib-boleth expected by the sons of Israel, the only name that could legitimize Moses’ mission. Yet in Exodus 3:14 God reveals to Moses another name, and we realize that there was a “name” behind the name, a secret phrase hidden in God’s (received) name,�� one congruent with God’s personal existence and point of view, expressing in the first person what the received

20. Abraham in Gen. 15:2, 22:14, 24:3.7, and see also 21:33; Isaac in Gen. 26:25; Jacob in Gen. 32:10.21. The theme of the deity’s hidden name belongs to Egyptian religious culture (see the section “The God and His Unknown Name of Power” in Pritchard 1969: 12–14), attaching a magical sense to the name in question: “knowing the gods’ secret name gave humans a degree of mastery over them” (Propp 1998: 224). The revelation of God’s “hidden name” in Exod. 3:14 is preventive in that sense: “The paronomasis, by its very circularity and indeter-minacy . . . makes sure that no magical power is deduced from it” (LaCoque and Ricoeur 1998: 311).


name, Yhwh, encapsulated in the third person.�� This name is first spelled out in its emphatic form, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, before being reduced to its core form, Ehyeh. After each of the revelations in Exodus 3:14ab, Moses keeps silent.�� Is he out of breath, at a loss for an answer, because of the oddity and the unique-ness of God’s first-person name? Or (and the motivations can accumulate) is he thereby betraying his surprise, a surprise analogous to the reader’s? Was Moses expecting a name (i.e., Yhwh) other than the one spelled out by God?�� Confronted by Moses’ silence, God indeed adjusts his presentation and does so in two steps. First, the general self-naming phrase gives place to a particular statement meant for the sons of Israel and picking up Moses’ projected scenario (“Suppose I come to the sons 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 shall I say to them?” [Exod. 3:13]): “Thus shall you say to the sons of Israel, Ehyeh has sent me to you” (Exod. 3:14b). The adjustment, however, is met once again by Moses’ silence, which leads God to a third statement, in which he reverts to the familiar third-person name (the token of intra-Israelite recognition).�� “Thus shall you say to the sons of Israel, Yhwh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my name forever, and this my remembrance for all generations” (Exod. 3:15). Driven by Moses’ silence, God has thus reentered the sphere of pragmatic communication, “leveling down the mystery” (Sternberg 1998: 266), in a kind of self-translation for the sake of the sons of Israel.�� The third-person name reverted to is indeed

22. See Rashbam and Bekhor Shor, for whom Yhwh calls himself אהיה, ehyeh, while others refer to him in the third person as Yhwh, assumed to be a form of יהיה, yihyeh; see also Jacob 1992: 76; Sternberg 1998: 265. Brichto 1992a: 24 summarizes the morphological problem raised by the ehyeh-Yhwh connection: “While it is true that we never have medial waw in the imperfect of the verb ‘to be’ in biblical Hebrew, its attestation in the participial and impera-tive forms is grounds enough for seeing a clear play, if nothing else, on the third person sin-gular imperfect; and if the waw in place of yodh is a relic of older pronunciation, why all the more reason to attach the pataḥ vowel to the affirmative yodh as in the older pronunciation to yield the widely accepted Yahweh.”23. For the technique of successive “and he said” (ויאמר)/“and she said” (ותאמר) that intro-duce a speech by the same speaker as a way to record the interlocutor’s silence, see Sonnet 2008: 76.24. If Moses knows the name (having absorbed it with his mother’s milk [see Exod. 2:8–10]), “he may be testing the voice, to see if it belongs to Yahweh. If, however, raised as an Egyptian, Moses is as ignorant as Pharaoh himself (5:2), he may anticipate that Israel will test both him and the voice” (Propp 1998: 223).25. The use of the third-person name is then a way to meet the people’s hypothetical request for “his name,” as pointed out by Sternberg (1998: 265).26. In a survey of the shifts from first to third person in divine self-designations in the Pentateuch, Mirguet (2009: 97–101) mentions as possible motivation the emphasizing of an already known divine name and the adoption of the human character’s perspective.


the one that will be used by Moses in his subsequent dealings with the sons of Israel.�� In other words, Moses�� and the reader are the only ones who have been made privy to God’s inner, first-person name.�� In Exodus 3:14 the reader has thus been abruptly exposed to an unprece-dented revelation and so subjected to surprise. “Catching the reader off-guard due to a false impression given earlier,” Sternberg (1985: 259) writes, “surprise brings all the pleasure of the unexpected as the [previous] ele-ments spring into new shape.” Surprise triggers a process of recognition that reorders and reinterprets all that intervenes (see ibid.: 314). Running into God’s first-person name, ehyeh, the reader of Exodus makes out that God has already and surreptitiously brought this name into play in a previ-ous assertion in Exodus 3:12: “I will be (ehyeh) with you.”�0 The recognition extends backward to Genesis, where the form ehyeh has occurred twice, in God’s promise, “And I will be (ehyeh) with you,” addressed to Isaac in Gene-sis 26:3 and to Jacob in 31:3. In other words, the reader now gathers that God’s inner name already played a role in his commitment to the fathers. Yet at the same time, the surprise of Exodus 3:14–15 triggers a retrospective reading of the previous occurrences of the third-person name, since, as Den Hertog (2002: 221) puts it, we now know that “Yhwh is, in a certain sense, only a derivative” from the first-person name.�� At the burning bush God has thus provided his received name with its authorized etymology and, as Herbert Marks (1995: 34) writes, “what the name buries or empedestals, the etymology animates or exhumes.”��

27. Moses will be asked by God to use the Yhwh name in transmitting specific commands to the people (see Exod. 3:16, 6:6.7.8, etc.); Moses will address the people and mention the name in question (see Exod. 12:23.25.27, 13:3.5.8.11.12.15.16, etc.); Moses and the people will pronounce it together in the Song of the Sea (see Exod. 15:1.2.3.6, etc.); the same name will be used in Moses’ transactions with Pharaoh (Exod. 3:18, 4:22, 7:16.17, 8:16, etc.).28. It is worth noting that, according to Exod. 33:12.17, the intimacy in the relationship is reciprocated insofar as God knows Moses “by name.” On Moses’ privileged knowledge, see Fischer 1989: 153–54.29. In the Pentateuch, the form ehyeh occurs only nine times (Gen. 26:3, 31:3; Exod. 3:12.14 [three times], 4:12.15; Deut. 31:23) and always in God’s speech (to Isaac and Jacob in Gene-sis; to Moses in Exodus; to Joshua in Deuteronomy). The ehyeh occurrences surveyed in Genesis and Exodus provide a paradigm for the subsequent uses in the Hebrew Bible. (In the Former Prophets, “I will be with you” in Josh. 1:5, 3:7; Judg. 6:16; see also 2 Sam. 7:1. In the other prophetic books, the ehyeh form occurs mainly in the phrase “I will be your God”; see Jer. 11.4, 24:7, 30:22, 31:1, 32:38; Ezek. 11:20, 14:11, 34:24, 36:28, 37:23; Zech. 8:8. Other occurrences are in Hos. 1:9, 14:6; Zech 2:9.)30. “At this point,” Brichto (1992a: 22) writes, “Moses is unaware that I am is a name of God (as against the awareness of the narrator or of the reader who is reading this not for the first time).”31. See the play between the first-person verb and the third-person name in Exod. 6:7: “I will be (והייתי) your God. And you shall know that I [am] Yhwh your God.”32. On Exod. 3:14 and etymology, see also von Rad 1962: 180–81; Marks 2002: 164. God’s


The Ehyeh asher ehyeh utterance not only creates a surprise, it also subtly announces or at least opens the door to surprises to come. On this reading, the stress in the formula falls on the asher (the what, the that, or the deter-mined who), and the idem per idem figure is no longer a device for indetermi-nacy but for intensification of the matter: it is what I will be that I will be.�� Moses and the reader are meant to recognize God’s self-determination in his freedom to reveal himself, beyond their interpretative business in prospection and retrospection. The Ehyeh asher ehyeh phrase then serves as a parable of the Bible’s way of springing “on the reader accomplished facts of divine choice, with little exposition or none or worse than none” (Sternberg 1985: 98). To these “accomplished facts” one may add intrinsic qualities, since divine attributes in the Hebrew Bible are communicated “(if they are) not in orderly form at the start but piecemeal and in their dramatic manifestations” (ibid.: 323). To read Exodus is not only to follow the suspense and curiosity tracks, it is also to go from disclosure to disclo-

answer in Exod. 3:14 thus illuminates a name that had remained opaque up to then. Hence God’s subsequent affirmation to Moses in Exod. 6:2–3: “I am Yhwh. I appeared to Abra-ham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shadday, but [as to/under/by] my name ‘Yhwh’ I was not known to them (ושמי יהוה לא נודעתי להם).” The form שמי, “my name,” can be understood as an accusative of specification or of limitation (see Gesenius and Kautzsch 1985 [1910]: § 144 l n3; Joüon and Muraoka 2006: § 126 g). It was not the name “Yhwh” that was not known but God under this name (see Rashi and Ibn Ezra about נודעתי, “I was known,” as nifal ): a knowledge now granted to Moses (Ibn Ezra), to whom the name’s “essence” has been disclosed (Rash-bam). The customary explanation of the tension created by Exod. 6:2–3 in terms of tradition or redaction history should not deter the reader from close reading nor dismiss the narra-tive’s claim for overall consistency. The patriarchs have indeed a close relationship with God as El Shadday and always in the context of fertility (Abraham, Gen. 17:1; Isaac, Gen. 28:3; Jacob, Gen. 35:11, 48:3, 49:25; with explicit divine revelation in Gen. 17:1 and 35:11), whereas Exod. 3:14 is unprecedented as a first-person disclosure in respect to the tetragrammaton in a context of prophetic mandate and of national liberation. To know someone under or by his or her name implies much more than ( just) knowing this name, as is clear in the case of Moses (compare Exod. 3:4, where God knows Moses’ name, with Exod. 33:12 and 33:17, where Moses is known to God “by name”). Furthermore, a specific knowledge of God as Yhwh is promised to the sons of Israel in the exodus experience (Bekhor Shor; see Exod. 6:7, 10:2, 16:12). See the discussions of Exod. 6:2–3 in Jacob 1992: 145–56; Sarna 1991: 31.33. Compare Jacob’s translation ( Jacob 1997: 66–70; Marks 2002: 165–67), “Ich werde es sein, der ich es sein werde,” with Luther’s “Ich werde sein, der ich sein werde.” For the intensi-fication value of the “paronomastische Relativsatze” (or idem per idem construction), see espe-cially Vriezen (1950: 505), who speaks of “heightening, intensification, or maximization of the content of the main sentence” (my translation). In addition to Exod. 3:14 and 33:19, Vriezen construes in that sense Ezek. 12:25, the third “paronomastische Relativsatze” in God’s own words: “For I, Yhwh, will speak that word that I will speak, and it shall be fulfilled (אדבר את אשר ”.(אדבר דבר ויעשה (See the discussion of the verse by Wambacq [1978: 332–34], who con-cludes, “Le contexte interdit d’interpréter la phrase comme une indétermination” [ibid.: 334]). An interesting parallel to Exod. 3:14 is the reuse of אדבר, “I will speak,” in Ezek. 12:28: in both cases, the nonemphatic form follows the emphatic one.


sure, from divine lightning to divine lightning, casting an unexpected and corrective light on the known story.�� Take the revelation in Exodus 4:22 of God’s father-son relationship to Israel, “Thus says Yhwh: Israel is my firstborn son.” The disclosure is totally unprecedented. The collective character whom God has hitherto called “my people” (Exod. 3:7.10) turns out to be “my firstborn son,” a “blood relative,” so to speak, who therefore falls within the responsibility of God as go’el or redeemer. In biblical law the go’el is a person’s nearest relative, committed to standing up for him or her and maintaining this person’s rights, notably when the person in question becomes a foreign-er’s slave; the kinsman, the go’el, is then bound to redeem his endangered relative (see Lev. 25:47–54). The legal category has, however, a theological counterpart, since the biblical God regularly assumes the go’el position vis-à-vis his people, regarded as his kin. So he does in Exodus 6:6: “Say there-fore to the sons of Israel, ‘I am Yhwh . . . , I will deliver you from slavery to [the Egyptians]. I will redeem you” (see also Exod. 15:13). Retrospec-tively, the reader must reassess God’s way of hearkening to the people’s cry when they were under the yoke of servitude in chapters 2 and 3.�� When “God saw and knew the sons of Israel” in their distress (Exod. 2:25), the reader now understands in retrospect, the God of the fathers was acting and reacting in his capacity as father. Yet Exodus’s most decisive surprise awaits Moses and the reader in God’s self-revelation at the book’s dramatic pivot in Exodus 32–34. When, following the golden calf affair, God grants Moses’ request to let him see his glory, he specifies: “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘Yhwh,’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy (וחנתי אשר ארחם אשר אחן ורחמתי את־ -Once more God’s third .(Exod. 33:19) ”(את־person name is associated with an idem per idem first-person utterance that echoes the name revealed in Exodus 3:14. The reader wonders: Is this utter-ance a further realization of God’s name? Does it represent the authorized determination of the Ehyeh asher ehyeh formula? What does the idem per idem construction imply here, indeterminacy (and thus suspense: grace and mercy in favor of whom?) or intensification, emphasizing God’s sovereignty in his grace and mercy? The context favors an interpretation in terms of intensifi-cation, since we already know that it is Moses who will enjoy the benefit of

34. Surprise is the dynamics most appropriate to genuine revelation, since it does without precedent or analogy, as God himself warns in Exod. 34:10: “I will do marvels, such as have not been performed (or created [נבראו]) in all the earth or in any nation.”35. In Exod. 2:23–25 (told by the narrator) and in 3:7–10 (in God’s words).


God’s favor (see Exod. 33:19a). Yet why such a metamorphosis of God’s self-naming phrase in terms of mercy, which leaves Moses speechless?�� These questions find an answer in Exodus 34:6–7 in God’s solemn proclamation of his name (as promised in Exod. 33:19) and attributes: “Yhwh, Yhwh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abound-ing in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thou-sandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the sons and the sons’ sons, to the third and the fourth generation.” This is a major surprise with regard to the previous revelation of God’s attributes in Exodus 20:5–6, during the formulation of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. There God has prohibited idolatry by appeal to a personal motivation: “for I, Yhwh your God, am a jealous God, punishing the chil-dren for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing mercy to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” This revelation is now forcefully echoed fourteen chapters later, in God’s personal outpouring to Moses in Exodus 34. Yet the echo brings about a surprise. What we thought came first, on the basis of the foundational revelation in Exodus 20—namely, the attribute of justice—now comes second, after what amounts to an infla-tion of the attribute of mercy. Far from being bound by any order what-soever, God, we now understand, is free to rank his attributes the way he chooses—Ehyeh asher ehyeh—and he wants them slanted here in favor of mercy. Surprise, as always, triggers recognition. The disclosure of Exodus 34 casts a retrospective light on God’s merciful behavior in the golden calf affair, when he refrained from inflicting on his people the wholesale punish-ment that he had planned to mete out (see Exod. 32:12). In particular, the dynamics of recognition retrospectively legitimizes Moses’ boldest request in Exodus 32: at the climax of his intercession on behalf of the idolatrous people, the prophet asked God to “repent” (Exod. 3:12), that is, to reverse his decision to annihilate the people (see Sonnet 2010: 485). Now, as we learn in Exodus 34:6, the “reversal” (of the order of attributes in favor of mercy) is lodged within God’s own self. In his daring imperative, “repent,” Moses was thus driven by a prophetic intuition of God’s inner makeup.��

36. As Alter (2004: 505) points out: “Extraordinarily, there are three consecutive itera-tions of the formula for introducing speech (verses 19, 20, 21) with no response from Moses. Moses, having asked to see God face to face, is in a daunting situation where it is God Who will do all the talking and explain the limits of the revelation to be vouchsafed to Moses.” This iteration echoes the triple ויאמר, “and he said,” in Exod. 3:14ab,15.37. See Scoralick’s (2002: 95) apt reference to Exod. 32:7–14 as “die dramatisierte Darstel-lung eines innergöttlichen Konflikts von Zorn und Reue” (see also ibid.: 119).


The perception of God’s scalar reordering in the hierarchy of his attributes was, in some sense, prepared by the assertion in Exodus 33:19, since the announcement to Moses (“And I will be gracious to whom I will be gra-cious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy”) anticipated the two attributes that now come first in God’s revised self-presentation: “a God merciful and gracious.” Yet it is only when the attributes in question appear in the (reordered) sequence of the attributes—in Exodus 34:6–7—that the divine inversion becomes fully perceptible. The peripeties in Exodus 32–34 throw a new light on Moses’ initial privi-lege. Why has Moses, and Moses alone, been made privy to God’s first-person name in its core form, Ehyeh, as well as in its paronomastic form, Ehyeh asher ehyeh? We can surmise that the determining factor is the com-missioning of Moses as prophet.�� God’s subsequent behavior indeed con-forms to the principle best formulated in Amos 3:7, “Surely Adonay Yhwh does nothing, without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets.”�� As a prophet, Moses is dramatically implicated in God’s self. If Moses kept silent when he first heard God’s name, he spoke up in his intercession for the people in Exodus 32, challenging God to be faithful to himself, that is, faithful to his unfolding self—Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In that dramatic hour, Moses pressed for an unfolding driven to the limit of reversal of intent, that is, repentance (see Sonnet 2010). Moses, then, was acting in his capacity as God’s second and prophetic self.�0

Conclusion

“A character, first of all, is the noise of his name, and all the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him” (Gass 1970: 116). The sound pattern of God’s utterance actually provides an essential clue in our inquiry. “In utter-ing [Ehyeh asher ehyeh],” Gabriel Josipovici (1988: 74) writes, God “indicates by this palindromic utterance, with its repeated ‘h’ and ‘sh’ sounds, that this is the breath that lies beneath all utterance and action.” What is her-

38. Exodus 3 is regularly understood as a scene of prophetic commissioning; see, for instance, Macchi 1996. From such a perspective, the revelation of the name has its generic context in the prophetic Botenspruch.39. Yet the prophet’s privileged information always hinges on God’s liberality, as shown by the counterexample in the cycle of Elisha: “Yhwh has hidden it from me, and has not told me” (2 Kings 4:27).40. And this could be a surprising collateral meaning of the Ehyeh asher ehyeh phrase (apt indeed, to leave Moses breathless), where asher amounts to a shifting “who”: “I will be who-ever I will be.” In his intercession in Exod. 32:11–14, Moses is enacting this “who”: represent-ing to God what he has done and said to the sons (Exod. 32:11–12) and to the fathers (Exod. 32:14); he is not only God’s most immediate interlocutor but acts as God’s second self, cata-lyzing the reversal of the announced decision.


alded in the prosody of God’s self-naming phrase gains confirmation from its multifold meaning in narrative context. As a catalyst of suspense, curi-osity, and surprise, the name revealed in Exodus 3 has equated the revela-tion of God’s character with its and his dramatic manifestation throughout Exodus or, in Paul Ricoeur’s (1985: 21) words, with God’s narrative iden-tity, “that is, the identity produced by the narrative itself.”�� In fact, all literary characters fall within the “X will be what X will be” pattern. What we reconstruct in reading, Seymour Chatman (1978: 119) writes, is “‘what the characters are like,’ where ‘like’ implies that their per-sonalities are open-ended, subject to further speculations and enrichments, visions and revisions.” God’s character is in this regard “not so much an exception as the harbinger of the rule” insofar as reading the Bible’s lead-ing character is, as with each of its characters, “a process of discovery, attended by all the biblical hallmarks: progressive reconstruction, tenta-tive closure of discontinuities, frequent and sometimes painful reshaping in face of the unexpected, and intractable pockets of darkness to the very end” (Sternberg 1985: 323). Yet the process is most intricate in the case of God. For not only do we lack any imaginative frame in which to “anchor” God’s narrative predicates (“most dimensions associated with character—physical appearance, social status, personal history, local habitation—do not apply to him at all” [ibid.]) but more decisively, the self-naming God also stands out as the master of his own characterization in a way that tran-scends any similar process in the case of human characters. God’s idiosyncrasy in his self-naming and in his reassertion of his name throughout history is central to the Bible’s narrative project. If Exodus’s overall narrative, before and after Exodus 3:14, has become the embodi-ment of God’s name, God’s character is not, for all that, lost in history, at the mercy of human contingencies, nor lost in story, subject to the intrica-cies of the narrative. God’s character is undoubtedly open-ended—Ehyeh asher ehyeh—yet in his case the dramatic manifestation goes with the asser-tion of a sovereign self.�� This point is announced and encapsulated in the self-naming phrase: God’s first-person ehyeh frames the phrase, which thus conveys Yhwh’s initiative in his revelation in history.�� The recurrence of

41. My translation. See Greenberg’s (1969: 83) apt paraphrase of Exod. 3:14 (and of Driver 1911: 24): “My presence [God says] will be something as undefined, something which, as my nature, is more and more unfolded by the lesson of history and the teachings of the prophets, will prove to be more than any formula can express” (see also Josipovici 1988: 74).42. In that sense, God’s character is far from being “perpetual potential,” pace Bloom and Rosenberg 1990: 289. Such a character rather represents “l’unique subjectivité surgissant absolument à partir d’elle-même” (Gilbert 2007: 36).43. God’s self-naming phrase is further marked by three aleph initials (אהיה אשר אהיה), which imply the theme of first-person subjectivity.


God’s ehyeh at the opening and the end of the phrase is in this sense a fine linguistic translation of the visual experience of the burning (and uncon-sumed) bush: in the name he spells out at the bush, God reveals himself as a multifarious existence and agent throughout time. Human contingencies, delays, and obstructions are not lacking in Exodus, yet the biblical God is asserting himself throughout all of them (see Sonnet 2010: 493–94). God’s achievement in history is effectively (re)presented in the book of Exodus by the storyteller’s art, with appropriate recourse to suspense, curiosity, and surprise. Yet in this regard, as I have tried to show, the master of biblical discourse definitely comes second, having found his or her model in the lord of biblical reality, the divine character.

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