(Exodus 6:1-8)
1. Then the LORD said unto Moses, Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.
2. And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the LORD:
3. And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.
4. And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers.
5. And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage; and I have remembered my covenant.
6. Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments:
7. And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
8. And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage: I am the LORD. (Exodus 6:1-8)
This text is a delight to many scholars because it gives an opportunity for debate and dissension.
The point at issue is God’s statement in v. 3 that, in His revelations to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He was not known by His Name, Jehovah, or Yahweh, but as God Almighty, El Shaddai.
Did God mean that prior to the burning bush episode God had never been called Jehovah or
Yahweh? In all of Genesis, the term El Shaddai is only used six times. How common was its usage, and was Yahweh or Jehovah an unknown term at that time?
There is, however, another possible approach. As Youngblood, for example, has pointed out, to know can be, first, casual, or knowledge by acquaintance, or, second, personal and more radical, or knowledge by experience.57 This does not mean that the experience of the patriarchs was superficial. Certainly Abraham’s experience on Mount Moriah, to cite but one instance, is evidence of the depth of their experience.
The name Jehovah, or Yahweh, means I AM THAT I AM, or, He Who Is, or, I shall be that (or, what) I shall be. El Shaddai means God Almighty, or God All-Sovereign; it points to God’s self-sufficiency and omnipotence, and this is close to Jehovah in meaning. As Oehler noted of Jehovah,
Inasmuch as God is just what He is, and so determines Himself in the historical manifestation of His existence, instead of being determined by anything outside of Him, the name carries us into the sphere of divine freedom. It expresses quite generally the absolute independence of God in His dominion. Through this factor of its meaning the name Jehovah is connected with El-Shaddai.58
It can be added that all the terms applied to God in Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch point to Jehovah. We should not expect these terms to contradict one another.
The term Jehovah, I AM THAT I AM, suggests God’s immutability, His eternity, and the fact that He is Life, the living God and the Creator; He is the Lord or Sovereign, and much, much more. The communicable attributes of God which make up His image in man, i.e., knowledge, righteousness (or, justice), holiness, and dominion (Gen. 1:26-28; Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10), man can to some degree understand, but His incommunicable attributes are only dimly apprehended.
Some have been cited; others include His independent Being or aseity, His infinity, His unity of singularity and of simplicity while being a trinity, and so on. With respect to eternity, man can
only think of endless time, not a transcendence of time. We know God truly because all of His Being is harmonious and self-consistent, but we can never know Him exhaustively.
The Name of God, which is not a name, in that it is not a description but a denial of comprehensibility by definition, is thus a reminder to us that there is more to God than our world, mind, or experience can comprehend. To know or experience that term, Jehovah, means to come face-to-face with the absoluteness and the transcendence of God. Our definitions are time-bound; they are in terms of this world and time, i.e., the created world, whereas God in His Being is the Uncreated One. The Name Jehovah thus compels us to look beyond a man-bound, time-bound reference.
In v. 7, however, God says, “and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God” when I deliver you from Egypt. The word translated as know here, and as known in v. 3, is the Hebrew yada (yawdah), which means to know, to see, to recognize, to understand, to acknowledge, and so on.
In Psalm 50:21, we are told by God, “These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself; but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.” To know the meaning of the term Jehovah means to recognize the transcendence of God, that He is not such a one as ourselves, and that the categories and causalities of time do not bind their Maker. It was the implication of the term Jehovah that was not known to the patriarchs.
The royal pronouncement of Egypt’s monarch began with the words, “I am Pharaoh” (Gen.
41:44). God begins His royal decree similarly: “I am the LORD,” or, Jehovah, Adonai (v. 2). I am in command, not man. Pharaoh had said, “I know not the LORD” (Ex. 5:2), and God was now about to make sure that Pharaoh did know.
George Rawlinson said of the meaning of Jehovah, “The primary idea of ‘Jehovah’ is… that of absolute, eternal, unconditional, independent existence.”59 Both Pharaoh and Israel were about to learn something of the meaning of Jehovah. For both, the learning would be a hard experience;
for Egypt, destructive judgment; for Israel, forty years in the wilderness.
In v. 5, God declares, “I have remembered my covenant.” All that follows is because of the covenant. God in His grace and mercy gave His law to Abraham and His seed, because a covenant is a treaty of law. However unfaithful Israel was in Egypt, God was faithful. Hence, in terms of that covenant, God now moves to redeem Israel (v. 6). The word redeem is a legal term, and it means, as Clements has so aptly summarized it,
the right of a member of a family to acquire persons or property belonging to that family which was in danger of falling to outside claimants. Thus if a member of the family was forced to sell himself into slavery, other members retained a special privilege of purchasing his freedom (Lev. 25:48). Here it expresses God’s protective action towards those who were regarded as belonging to him.60
By His covenant, God makes Himself next of kin to the covenant people. In the incarnation, Jesus Christ, by becoming very man of very man while also very God of very God, becomes our next of kin and delivers us from the power of sin and death.
Not only is salvation a covenant fact, but also prayer. We pray “in Jesus’ Name,” in the Name of our next of kin, to God the Father.
We thus have here, as throughout Scripture, an amazing juxtaposition of things. We have a strong reminder that God is Jehovah, He Who Is, one far beyond our abilities of comprehension.
He transcends in Being and Person our mind, time, and creation. At the same time, He declares His total command of time, history, and all creation in terms of His covenant grace and purpose.
In terms of His total memory, He remembers in due time His promise of the land of Canaan, as made to Abraham. It is perhaps not likely that many Israelites in Egypt remembered it, but God did.
In Revelation 6:9-11, we see all those slain for the word of God cry out from under the altar,
“How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” They are given the assurance that in God’s “time,” although more would be slain,
there would be a full accounting. The timing is not man’s, but the covenant faithfulness is certain.
For the present, God assures Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to the Pharaoh; he will be forced to let them go, he will be forced to put them out of his country” (Moffatt). Everything Pharaoh does will increase his judgment, and the ruin of his land will be his own doing. An old saying has it, “Whom God wishes to destroy He first deprives of reason.” Longfellow, in The Morgue of Pandora VI, cited it as, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” the more familiar form of the proverb. In any case, this was true of Pharaoh.