The divine name does not mean “I Am”

Indexé : 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]The divine name does not mean I am. Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And in Exodus 3, Moses encounters God and is commissioned to go let the children of Israel know that God will deliver them.

[00:00:14]And Moses asks, "When they ask me, what's God's name, what should I say?"

[00:00:20]And then we get verses 14 and 15. Here's the Hebrew of Exodus 3:14 and 15. And God said to Moses, which is the first red box, I will be what I will be. And he said, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, echa, I will be, that's the second red box, has sent me to y'all." And then we get verse 15. And God spoke again to Moses. Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, Adoni, that's the third red box, the tetetrogrammaton, the divine name. Yode Vave, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This will be my name for eternity, and this will be my memorial from generation to generation. So the first two red boxes here do not have the tetra grammaton. They do not have the divine name. They have alf which is the verbal root hay in the yetol or the prefix form and conjugated in the first person. Now the yetol or the prefix form can refer to current and incomplete action but with the verbal root haya to be or become it is always in the future. So this is I will be what I will be.

[00:01:40]The third red box is the tetetrogrammaton adoni yod vave which many scholars think is based on the verbal root haya but does not mean I am or I will be at best it's a third person and some scholars have said well god is explaining their name in the first person so is using the first person but god never uses the first person anywhere else and this is an odd sequence of events to give one name and then to immediately follow up by giving another name and the first name is what's known in Latin as an edom per edom same by the same construction which is usually a circumlocution. It's usually what you use when you don't have the means or the desire to be more specific. It's a way of talking around something. And a lot of scholars think that that's what's going on here. God is being less precise and then more precise. And this is kind of a folk etmology to say, look, the divine name is based on the verbal root hya. But scholars are not sure exactly how it would be based on the verbal root haya.

[00:02:52]It does not fit perfectly into how verbs functioned in these time periods in ancient Hebrew. The divine name may just be the name of a place or the name of a people. that is not translatable that is just a name we're not exactly sure but what we can be sure about is that the tetetrogrammaton yode vave does not mean I am and when we talk about god's name being I am we're really just referring to this circumlocution this approximation of God's name that is not god's name so when you say I am you're really just saying yeah this is something like the name of God. But again, the divine name, the name of God does not mean I am.