Exodus 3:13–15

Exodus 3:13 — Moses's Practical Dilemma, and Its Deeper Weight

Moses's question is ostensibly pragmatic: the Israelites will demand credentials. In the ancient Near East, to know a god's name was not merely to identify them but to enter a relationship with them — names carried ontological weight, disclosing the inner nature of the one who bore them. Moses is therefore asking something far more than "what should I call you?" He is asking: Who are you, really? The children of Israel have endured four centuries of silence and suffering. They will demand to know not just that a god has spoken, but which god, and of what character and power. Moses's own uncertainty — he has spent forty years in Midian, distant from Hebrew communal memory — gives the question existential urgency. He cannot proclaim what he does not himself understand.

Exodus 3:14 — "I AM WHO I AM": The Revelation of Pure Being

God's answer, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, is one of the most debated phrases in biblical scholarship. The Hebrew verb hayah ("to be") in the first-person imperfect carries a sense of dynamic, active existence — not merely static being but ongoing, self-sustaining presence. Several interpretive layers are available simultaneously:

• Ontological: "I am the one whose very essence is to exist" — Being itself, uncaused, underived, without beginning or end.
• Relational: "I will be who I will be" (an equally valid translation) — a pledge of continuing, faithful presence: I will be with you, as I am, in whatever way you will need.
• Deliberate reticence: Some Church Fathers noted that the name withholds as much as it reveals — God is not one deity among many who can be catalogued; He transcends every category.

The abbreviation God immediately gives for public use — "Tell them I AM has sent me" (Ehyeh alone) — is breathtaking. Israel is not to invoke a god of thunder or fertility, but the sheer, undivided act of existing. The name is a sentence without an object: "I AM" — complete in itself, needing nothing outside itself to be grammatically or ontologically whole.

Exodus 3:15 — The Personal Name and the Covenant Chain

God adds a second, complementary disclosure: Yahweh (rendered LORD in small capitals in most translations), the third-person form of the same verb — "He who is," or "He who causes to be." This is declared to be God's name "forever" (le-olam) and His "memorial" (zikron) to all generations — a liturgical term suggesting the name is to be invoked in worship across time. Crucially, God binds this eternal name to three specific human beings: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. The infinite is yoked to the finite; the metaphysical is inseparable from the historical covenant. This is not a philosophical abstraction but a name embedded in a story of promise, failure, faithfulness, and rescue. The triple formulation — God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — is a recitation of saving acts. Each patriarch received God's promise in a different way; together they form the arch of a covenant not yet completed, pointing forward to the liberation about to unfold through Moses and, in its fullness, through Christ.

Typological and Spiritual Senses

The Fathers saw in Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh a prophetic anticipation of the Incarnation: the one who IS, taking a name that creatures could speak and survive. John's Gospel will transform this passage into Christology: "Before Abraham was, I AM" (Jn 8:58). The burning bush — unconsumed, radiant with presence — is a patristic type of the Virgin Mary, who bore the divine fire without being consumed. The revelation of the Name points forward to the moment when the Name takes flesh and dwells among us (Jn 1:14).

Catholic tradition has returned to Exodus 3:14 with particular depth and consistency, seeing in it a philosophical as well as revelatory foundation for all theology.

The Fathers: St. Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses, c. 390) identified "I AM WHO I AM" as the supreme indication that God alone possesses true being, while creatures possess only a derived, contingent existence. St. Augustine (De Trinitate V, 2) saw in the name an disclosure of divine immutability: "He is supremely and primarily; from Him all being derives." For Augustine, the contrast between the eternal I AM and human mutability is the ground of humility and the beginning of wisdom.

Aquinas and Scholastic Tradition: St. Thomas Aquinas made Exodus 3:14 the cornerstone of his entire theology of the divine names (Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 11). He argued that Qui est — "He Who Is" — is the most proper name of God because it signifies not a quality or relationship but esse ipsum subsistens: subsistent Being Itself. God does not have existence; He is existence. Every other name applies to God partially or analogically; this name applies to Him essentially.

The Catechism: CCC 206–213 dedicates sustained attention to this passage, teaching that God's name "I AM" reveals that He is "the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end" (CCC 213). The Catechism also emphasizes the relational dimension: the name is given in the context of liberation and covenant, not abstract philosophy. CCC 2666 notes that the name of Jesus is the human pronunciation of the divine Name, fulfilling the revelation of Exodus.

Vatican I (Dei Filius, 1870) cited this divine self-disclosure as the basis for the Church's teaching that God's existence and nature can be known by human reason, but are also graciously confirmed by revelation.

The name "Yahweh" was considered so sacred in Second Temple Judaism that it was never pronounced aloud; this reverence itself became a theological statement: ultimate Being exceeds all speech. The Church's instruction to translate the Tetragrammaton as LORD in liturgical texts (Congregation for Divine Worship, 2008) continues this tradition of reverent restraint.

The revelation "I AM WHO I AM" is a direct challenge to our culture's deepest anxieties. We live in an age of radical contingency — of identities constructed, deconstructed, and performed — where even the self feels unstable and unmoored. Into this anxiety God speaks a Name that is pure, unqualified existence: not "I was," not "I will be," but I AM — present tense, unconditional, requiring nothing outside Himself to be fully real. For the Catholic today, this is not a philosophical curiosity but an invitation to prayer. When you feel the ground shifting beneath your sense of self, your sense of meaning, your sense of God's presence — the Name calls you back to the one Reality that cannot be shaken.

Practically: meditate on the divine name in Eucharistic Adoration, recognizing that He who is I AM is bodily present before you. Let Moses's boldness teach you to bring your actual questions to God — not polished, pious ones, but the raw "Who are you, really?" that comes from genuine seeking. And note that God answered Moses not with a lecture but with a mission: He revealed His name in the context of sending. Knowing God's name is inseparable from going where He sends you.