Why Did God Give YHWH as God's Name?

Both Jehovah and Yahweh come from the Torah's account of God declaring to Moses that "I Am Who I Am" would send him to free the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. That God did so in a language lacking vowels is both puzzling and crucial.

Puzzling, of course, because no one knows how to pronounce God's proper name. If anyone ever did, God's sober injunctions to not take God's name in vain soon led to pious disuse of YHWH as an overt reference to God. This is the crucial part: the name God gives Moses is elusive, evasive, sly. It is also powerfully declarative.

God is sending Moses into a land where naming a god gives one power over a god. The God of Torah will have no part of this. So God gives Moses something rather tautological: God is indeed who God is, but this seems to offer us no new content. God gives us nothing new about God. The omission is not coincidental.

The same principle underlies the biblical prohibitions against making images. We have essential control over something we see that cannot speak- the subservient principle of being seen and not heard. Images fix gods in particular places. All of the pagan local religions had regional gods, but the God of Torah is going to go with Moses until he returns the people to that particular mountain.

So, being everywhere, God remains the biblical voice from nowhere- yes, in the case of this narrative from a burning bush- but he makes it clear that this instance is only temporary. God will not have Moses thinking the burning bush is God, however astonishing it would have been.

So God refuses to be pinned down. This God is a different kind of God.

Yet this evasion is not only intended to prevent misunderstanding. The original Hebrew might also contain a wonderful promise; the name might also be translated as "I Will Be Who I Will Be" or "I Will Do What I Will Do."

This is indeed not only the God who will not be pinned down. This God is going to do as God says, and by this God will be known. This reverses the pagan sense of having gods that increase human fecundity (sacrifice in exchange for greater crops) to God having humans increase divine fertility, as in the Biblical images that present humans as workers in the harvest.

This marks the unique characterization of the Judeo-Christian God; in this speech God becomes the God of history as a whole, not particular segments of human experience.

Moses is going as God's agent, God assures him, not the other way around.

And God's elusive and promising name helps Moses see that this is so.