Exodus 4:1-17 continues Moses’ conversation with God at the burning bush after the revelation of the divine name. It is marked by Moses’ unwillingness to do what God has tasked him to do. This episode covers God’s compassionate responses to Moses and also his anger when Moses refuses the job. The conversation takes us into supernatural sign acts, Egyptian magic, and the concession by God of bringing Aaron (and the Aaronic priesthood) into his plan for Israel.
Exodus 3:13-14 are two of the most familiar verses in the Old Testament: “Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”God reveals his name here in the first person (ehyeh – I AM), but most of the time the Old Testament has the divine name in the third person (Yahweh). Biblical names typically have meanings, so what is the meaning of this name for God?
People can go up to my website for a detailed discussion of this. I favor the second view: “I am he who causes to be all that is,” arguing for a hiphil, a causative, vocalization of the verbal name phrase.
This episode builds off Part 2a and our discussion of the Kenite Hypothesis. The episode essentially asks this question: How would a literate ancient Jew, with knowledge of 1 Enoch and the Hebrew Bible, understand the biblical writer’s linkage of the Kenites (relatives of Abraham and Moses) to Cain the murderer, whom the writer of Enoch associated with the sins of the Watchers? The answer may surprise you, and even bless you.
Exodus 3:1 puts Moses in Midian, a land that, as we saw in Part 1, is closely tied to occupants known as Kenites. The Kenites, in fact, overlap in biblical thought with the Midianites (Judg 1:16; 4:11). Midian is also connected with the idea that Yahweh, the God of Israel, came to his land “from the South,” where “South” is defined as Edom, Teman, Paran, and Midian (Hab 3:3-7; Deut 33:1-2; Judg 5:4-5). It is for this reason (and some archaeological data) that many scholars and archaeologists believe that the Kenites / Midianites transmitted the knowledge of Yahweh to Moses (and, hence, Israel). This episode explores the coherence of this idea.
This episode focuses on Exod 3:1 (“Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God”) and how the place names (Horeb, Midian, “mountain of God”) might possibly dovetail with traditions about Yahweh “coming from the South” (from Teman, Paran, Edom, Seir) in other passages (Deut 33:2; Hab 3:3-7; Judg 5:4-5). Biblical critics have used the apparently contradictory nature of these passages to argue for biblical inconsistency with sources and that Yahweh worship did not originate with the Israelites. Others who have rejected the traditional location of Mount Sinai (Jebel Musa in the “V” of the Sinai Peninsula) in favor of Jebel al-Lawz in Midian have ignored or missed these passages.
