God’s Many Names by Baden

This post is Claude’s summary of the Joel Baden’s Misquotiong Moses podcast’s transcript that is in his directory in DropBox. Baden provides the explanations of the many names/titles offered by other scholars. His thoughts about “I Am that I Am”as being Yahweh being frustrated with Moses is notable.

Summary: Joel Baden on God’s Real Name Isn’t in Your Bible

Format: Megan Kregge of the Bart Ehrman team interviews Hebrew Bible scholar Dr. Joel Baden. The episode traces how Israel’s God is named and portrayed. It ends with a “hot take” on Exodus 3:14. The transcript has some auto-transcription errors, such as “Kuntiladaj rude,” which is presumably Kuntillet Ajrud.

The Divine Titles

• Elohim: a generic noun meaning “God,” not a name. It has a plural ending, but it takes singular verbs and pronouns (e.g., Gen 1), so the text treats the deity as one. Baden says he has no good explanation for the plural form, and he dismisses the “royal plural” idea. It derives from El, the Semitic word for “god” (cognate with Arabic Allah). El was also the chief, throne-sitting deity of the Canaanite pantheon.
• El Shaddai: often translated “God Almighty,” but Shaddai probably does not mean “Almighty.” It likely relates to a Semitic word for “mountains” or “hills.” That would point to a mountain-dwelling or hill-country god. It appears mostly in older poetry and the patriarchal narratives.
• (YHWH) Sabaot / “of Hosts”: a title, not a name. It means “armies” or “hosts,” and for God it refers to the heavenly court. It also fits the warrior imagery.

The Name Yahweh

• English Bibles render the Hebrew proper name as “LORD.” Baden calls this a major obscuring, since the Hebrew text treats the name as real, powerful, and revealed.
• Its pronunciation is probably Yahweh, but this is a scholarly best guess.
• Early Judaism stopped pronouncing the name and substituted Adonai (“Lord”). The Septuagint did the same with kurios.
• Medieval scribes added the vowels of Adonai to the consonants YHWH. That produced “Jehovah,” which Baden calls a Christian misreading of a Jewish scribal practice. He says it was not treated as God’s name until roughly the 17th century.
• Key argument: proper names are needed only when there are multiple members of a category. A god with a personal name therefore implies a polytheistic setting, with Israel’s god distinguished from Moab’s, for example. The name persisted after Israel became monotheistic and was then simply read as “Lord.”

God’s Character and Development

• Inconsistent portrayal: God is distant and intimate, heavenly and earthly, angry and generous, warrior, personal, national, and universal. Baden suggests this blend underlies later ideas of a God who is both cosmic creator and personally involved. He recommends Jack Miles’s Pulitzer-winning God: A Biography for a purely literary reading.
• Historical explanation: Yahweh seems to have absorbed traits from Canaanite deities. He has El’s role as judge on a throne and Baal’s role as storm and warrior god. Baden says some Psalms may originally have been written for other deities, with “Yahweh” substituted. He also notes borrowed myths, such as the defeat of the sea monster Leviathan (Job, Isaiah, and hints in Gen 1).
• Caution on linear development: Baden resists a clean “first they believed X, then Y” model. He expects different groups (priests, scribes, prophets, farmers, North and South, earlier and later) held different views at once. The patriarchal “God of my father” and “God of Isaac” language probably reflects an earlier tribal-familial stage. Even so, he guesses that tribal, national, and universal conceptions coexisted, and that biblical authors arranged them into a sequence.
• Gender: Yahweh was understood as male, in line with the chief deities of surrounding nations.

Origins and Location

• Origins: Baden says the origins of any deity are murky. Yahweh does not appear in Canaanite myth or other surrounding cultures, so he seems to appear “fully formed.” A few texts place Yahweh’s origin in the south (Sinai, the Negev). Together with the Sinai tradition, that hints at a southern, desert origin. Some propose Israel borrowed him from a southern group, but Baden stresses there is no direct evidence.
• Embodiment and place: Baden says ancient Israelites likely imagined a deity with a body, probably a human-like one (a teaser for a future episode). God could live on a mountain, in heaven, in a tent or temple, and wander on earth all at once. He compares the Greek gods, who live on Olympus and also dwell in temples. Baden cites the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions’ “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman” as showing that local and universal conceptions of Yahweh coexisted.

Hot Take: Exodus 3:14 Is a Joke

• Baden says the meaning of “Yahweh” is probably “he causes to be” (from the verb “to be”).
• His main claim is that “I AM THAT I AM” (Exod 3:14, ASV; Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh, which could also mean “I will be what I will be”) is not God’s secret, profound name. He gives three reasons:
  1. The phrase appears only once, and no other text builds on it. Yahweh, by contrast, appears thousands of times.
  2. In the next verse (3:15), God immediately says, in effect, “call me Yahweh, that is my name forever.” The story therefore gives two answers.
  3. He reads ehyeh asher ehyeh as a pun on Yahweh and a sign of God’s exasperation with Moses, who is stalling. God is saying with frustration to the stalling Moses “call me whatever you want!” Then in the next verse God relents and gives the real answer.
• Baden says much interpretive effort has gone into reading metaphysical depth into the line, and he suggests letting it go. Megan adds that the Hebrew Bible is often funny and Joel agreed.

Sources: Joel Baden interview, Misquoting Moses (Bart Ehrman team), transcript dated 10/19/2026. Biblical quotation: Exod 3:14, ASV.