The revelation at the burning bush is amongst the most powerful and enduring images in human history, and most especially so because of the climactic event described in Exodus 3:14.  What makes this event so striking and so fascinating is not that it is an encounter between God and man, because there are many such encounters described in the Bible.  It is that in response to a question regarding the way in which God should be identified to man, God speaks words that are by some distance the most enigmatic and abstract to be found anywhere in the Bible, words that carried a meaning so potent as to have inspired Moses and the Children of Israel to the legendary acts of courage and faith described in the Book of Exodus.  These words are therefore extremely important in the context of Jewish history, and so in human history.

They are however made all the more fascinating by the problem that attends upon them, which is that their meaning has not been commonly understood since at least the time of the writing of the Septuagint, more than two thousand years.  The reason for this is partly that the words with which we are concerned can have more than one meaning, but it is even more so that none of their literal translations are obviously meaningful in the context of the verse.  If it were simply a matter of choosing between one translation that makes obvious good sense and others that do not then the problem would have long since been solved.  But in Exodus 3:14 we are confronted with several possible literal translations and none of them make obvious good sense in the context of the verse.

And so there remains a generally acknowledged uncertainty in relation to the meaning of these words.  Because of this uncertainty some have gone so far as to suggest that they are actually meaningless or incomprehensible, which would in turn suggest that the words God addresses to Moses on the occasion of his prophetic commissioning, and the single word with which he was to demonstrate to the Israelites his knowledge of their God, were and are meaningless or incomprehensible.  That is highly improbable, especially when we consider the events these same words are said to have inspired.  Moreover, neither Moses nor the Israelites appear to have had any difficulty in understanding them because neither he nor they comment upon them at all, and so the implication of the biblical text is that the words of Exodus 3:14 were both highly meaningful and readily comprehensible to those who first heard them.  Furthermore, because they relate to so timeless and universal a concern as the way in which God should be made known to man, there is every reason to believe that they would be just as meaningful for us today and no reason to believe they would be any less comprehensible.  The words to which I am referring are ehyeh asher ehyeh in Exodus 3:14a and ehyeh in Exodus 3:14b.

In what follows I designate the distinction between the first and second part of Exodus 3:14 as 3:14a and 3:14b respectively.  From the start of the verse to the end of ehyeh asher ehyeh is 3:14a, and 3:14b is the remainder of the verses.[1]  I also refer to the ehyeh of 3:14b as the absolute ehyeh because it is a first person singular verbal form occurring without a predicate.

The paper is henceforth comprised of two parts.  Part I is a review of the Jewish translations and interpretations of Exodus 3:14 over the course of the last 2,300 years.  It begins with a separate analysis of the early Greek and Latin translations because these are useful in highlighting the exegetical difficulties that attend upon this verse and in demonstrating how these difficulties have been variously tackled.  Part I continues with a review of interpretations drawn from a wide variety of Jewish sources and is organised under seven headings.  Those who are not already convinced of the importance of this verse may wish to postpone their reading of Part I until such a time as they are, and they may be relieved to know that they can do so without detriment to their appreciation of the most important content of Part II.  To them I would only suggest that they read the summary at the end of Part I in order to acquaint themselves with the background against which the contents of Part II can be most fully appreciated.

Part II contains my reason for writing this paper.  It is comprised of my own analysis of the relevant biblical text, the identification of the Divine name in Exodus 3:14, a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of this name, an analysis and interpretation of the remainder of the verse in the light of this meaning, the translation of the verse that my exegesis implies, and a concise exegetical key for its interpretation.

Throughout this paper I refer to God in the masculine.  This is not an attribution of gender to God but is rather a reflection of the religious language with which I am most familiar and that feels most natural to me.