Exodus 6:2-9:35
A Divine Guarantee
This week’s reading begins with God telling Moses, “I am the Lord” (spelled YHWH). But surely Moses knew that already. In fact, just a few paragraphs earlier, God had instructed Moses to tell the Israelites, “The Lord, the God of your fathers…has sent me to you; this is My name forever, and so I will be known for all generations” (Exod 3:15). So Moses already knew God’s sacred name. In fact, long before this, Noah, Abraham, Lot, and others had already referred to God by this most sacred name. Then what is the point of explaining it here, as if for the first time?
The answer rests in a phenomenon found elsewhere in the Torah. Often, God finishes a pronouncement with the words, “I am the Lord,” or “I am the Lord your God.” For example, sometime later on, God tells Moses to say to the Israelites, “You will observe My statutes and keep My laws and follow them; I am the Lord your God.” So you will keep My laws and My statutes which, if a person observes them, he will live by them; I am the Lord. None of you shall come near anyone of his own flesh to uncover nakedness; I am the Lord” (Lev 18:4 and again in 18:6). Why should God keep reminding Moses that it is God who is speaking? Was Moses really in danger of forgetting this fact from one verse to the next?
Actually, “I am the Lord” functions in all these instances as the ancient equivalent of a signature in our own society. When you rent an apartment or buy a car or anything similar, there is usually some sort of written agreement specifying the price and other matters. At the bottom of the last page, the parties to the agreement append their signatures—and presto! The agreement becomes official. Something similar happens when God says, “I am the Lord.” It means something like, “I stand by what I just said,” or “This is now official.”
But this doesn’t quite explain why God needed to use His “signature” in the particular case of the first verses of this week’s Torah reading. To understand this, we have to go back to the words God spoke at the end of last week’s reading.
Last week’s reading ended with God telling Moses, “You will see soon enough what I will do to Pharaoh; he will set the Israelites free with all the force that he has” (Exodus 6:1). Moses reacts to God’s words by saying… nothing. Between the end of last week’s reading and this week’s, Moses maintains a stony silence. Why?
Such silences have a special meaning in the Torah. In a normal conversation, first A speaks to B, then B answers. But sometimes, A speaks to B and B says nothing, causing A to speak again. Ancient listeners/readers understood that B was somehow surprised at, or dissatisfied with, what A had said at first. B’s polite silence was a way of indicating that he was still waiting for something more from A. (One classic example is God’s reaction to Moses’ repeated silences in Exod 33:18-23.)
In the case at hand, our Rabbis understood that Moses was indeed keeping silent for a reason. He must at first have been pleased with God’s promise that Pharaoh would let the Israelites leave Egypt, but this promise had not been followed up by God’s signature, “I am the Lord.”
So Moses waits and waits, until God finally says, “I am the Lord” in the first verse of this week’s reading. But at the same time God scolds Moses, saying in effect, “When I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I did not have to give them any guarantee by identifying Myself to them with that special phrase, ‘I am the Lord.’ They simply trusted Me, and I took care of the rest. But you, Moses, seem to need some sort of guarantee. All right, I’ll give it to you. But next time, you should just trust Me without any guarantee—the way your ancestors did. Too bad they are no longer with us!”