God has a name – 6

Motyer notes, arguing on the basis of Judges 13:17, Genesis 32:27 and Proverbs 30:4, ‘The question “What is thy name?” is, therefore, the same as “What sort of person are you?”’. In this it is as much metonymous as it is anything else. What was not known about YHWH was not his name, but his character. The name ‘YHWH’ was not unfamiliar to this slave people of Goshen. What they didn’t know was what this name meant. Who is this YHWH? Etymology leaves us wanting, as does any investigation via a history-of-religions track (a track that rarely bares fruit). The divine word spoken in Exodus 3 only makes sense in the context of Israel’s plight in Egypt and in the broader Exodus narrative in which YHWH makes himself known in the form of the plagues (7:5, 17; 8:10, 22; 9:14, 29, 30; 10:2; 11:7) and deliverance itself (6:7; 14:4, 18; 16:6, 12). Indeed, YHWH is Israel’s verb around which their whole sentence (history) is structured.

Brueggemann is correct when he writes, ‘it is plausible that the entire Exodus narrative is an exposition of the name of Exod 3:14, requiring all of its powerful verbs for an adequate exposition’. Only after these experiences could it then be said that the people knew YHWH (cf. Exod 18:11; 29:46; Deut 4:35, 39; 7:9; 29:2–6) – not merely his name but his character. Out of what Egypt had become, a place where Israel understandably envisaged her future as certain death, YHWH takes Moses into the wilderness, into the nothingness, into the ‘realm of the suspension of the actual’. It is there that he tells Moses his name, a name that will take the rest of the exodus narrative, and the incarnation of the Immanuel to flesh out. But even by Exodus 19, YHWH had revealed his nature to Israel as one who had borne them on eagles’ wings and brought them to himself that they might obey his voice and keep his covenant and be his treasured possession among all peoples, although all the earth is his (Exod 19:4–5).

Israel’s entire creatio-soterio-historical narrative provides an explication of what the name YHWH means. But is it more than this? The name itself shapes Israel’s creatio-soterio-historical narrative. In other words, not merely does Israel’s history reveal something about the divine name, but the divine name also reveals something about how that history itself is to be interpreted.