Pharaoh’s admirable stand
Exodus 8, and a note about God’s name.
Welcome to the Daily Bible Chapter. My name is James Leroy Wilson and I invite you to join me as we discover new insights and new perspectives from a very old book.
Before I begin — before I even read this chapter, I want to comment about this character known as God. In Genesis 1, we know that God was at the beginning and called things into existence. In Genesis 2, God was referred to as the LORD, but it took several chapters to conclude that the LORD (Jehovah in Young’s Literal Translation) and other names such as God Most High and God Almighty are referring to the exact same being as the God mentioned in Genesis 1.
We might think “the LORD God” and “God” are obviously the same, but that’s only because the culture has assumed it all along. It’s not so obvious when reading the Bible from the beginning with no predetermined conception of “God.” Imagine a book about me, and the first chapter calls me “James Leroy Wilson” and the second chapter suddenly talks about “Jim Wilson,” Why would the reader know it’s the same person?
Exodus 3:14 of the NRSV says:
14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”[a] He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
The footnote to “I am who I am” says “Or I am what I am or I will be what I will be,”
Exodus 3:15 says:
5 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord,[b] the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.
The footnote to “The LORD” says:
The word “Lord” when spelled with capital letters stands for the divine name, YHWH, which is here connected with the verb hayah, “to be.”
(YHWH is how “Jehovah” was derived and is used in Young’s Literal Translation and other older translations).
“To be” is to exist. To say “I am” is to be aware of one’s own existence.
Because Genesis 1 says God was at the beginning, when I see “The LORD” mentioned in the…
