2/26/2004 05:04:00 PM|||Andrew|||Today in my Bible as Literature class we talked about the names of God, specifically in reference to Exodus 3 and 6, where God reveals his name to Moses. This is one of those times when I was really glad our prof is an orthodox Jew, because I doubt anyone else would have known this or been able to explain it.

In Exodus 3.14, my text (the New Jewish Publication Society's translation) reads, "And God said to Moses, "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh." He continued, "Thus shall you say to the Israelites, 'Ehyeh sent me to you.'" Now the NJPS chooses to leave the text with the transliterated Hebrew because apparently it's a much more difficult thing to translate than I've ever been led to believe. The tenses are...slippery, to use my prof's word. While the traditional rendering goes something like: "I am that I am," a more accurately literal translation might be something like, "am that am," or "being that being," or even "being is being." This last I especially like. It grounds God as the very foundation of all reality, something expounded over and over again in the New Testament.

But here's the fun part. Ehyeh ("I am") comes from the root Ahyh, and the tetragrammaton, YHVH, derives from this same root. And even better: in their worship, Jews will sing of God, speaking thusly: "hayah, huveh, yeyeh", literally, "he was, he is, he will be." YHVH can be formed by taking the combination of the consonants in these three words together. And even better! My prof explicitly said that this triple affirmation of God's being, which is reaffirmed in his name, has a strong resonance with the Christian concept of the Trinity. Not three seperate parts, but three modes, three forms of the same essential being. How awesome is that?|||107784389805277533|||