This post contains Claude.ai’s summary of the BAR article by Ronald Hendle titled Parsing the Divine Name. A PDF copy of it is in his directory in Dropbox. The second response provides scholar’s different inntrepretations of ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh. Below that is a Response related to James Tabor followed by one related to Bart Ehrman.
Here’s a summary of Ronald Hendel’s article. Emphasis is mine.
The Vocalization Problem
Hendel explains why many biblical scholars use “Yahweh” despite the name’s ambiguous status in the Hebrew text. Ancient Hebrew is consonantal, and in the tetragrammaton (YHWH) the final he functions as a vowel marker rather than a full consonant — this pattern holds both in Iron Age inscriptions (Mesha Stele, Kuntillet ʿAjrud, Arad, Lachish) and in the Hebrew Bible itself. The vowel points added by medieval Masoretes under YHWH don’t represent the name’s actual vowels — they borrow the vowels of Adonai (“my Lord”), signaling the reading substitution rather than preserving original pronunciation. This convention already appears in the Old Greek Pentateuch (3rd century BCE), which renders YHWH as kurios (“Lord”).
Reconstructing “Yahweh”
Despite this, Hendel argues the pronunciation can be reconstructed with reasonable confidence:
- The first syllable, Yah, survives in liturgical formulas like “Halleluyah” and in theophoric names (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Josiah, Obadiah, etc.), as well as in poetic usage — e.g., ASV’s Exodus 15:2, “Jehovah is my strength and song,” which reflects the older form Yah.
- The second syllable is inferred linguistically: a Hebrew word beginning ya- is typically a verb form, and the final he in such verbs indicates an -eh vowel (as in the place name Yavneh, from yabneh, “he builds”). This suggests Yahweh derives from a verbal form of “to be,” possibly meaning “he causes to be” or “he blows/moves.” Greek transcriptions like Iabe and Iaoue support this reconstruction.
- Hendel connects this to the wordplay in Exodus 3:14–15, where God’s answer to Moses — ‘ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh — echoes the sound of the not-yet-spoken name.
The Prohibition on Pronunciation
The taboo against saying the name traces to interpretation of the third commandment (“You shall not take the name of YHWH your God in vain,” Exodus 20:7). Originally this targeted false oaths and cursing (cf. Leviticus 19:12, 24:15–16), but later tradition broadened it to forbid uttering the name at all — a “hedge around the Law.” The Old Greek’s rendering of Leviticus 24:16 already reflects this expanded reading. Hence substitutes like “Lord” or ha-Shem (“the Name”).
Hendel’s Conclusion
When scholars write “Yahweh,” it’s a historical-linguistic reconstruction, not a devotional or irreverent act — a deliberate signal that the discourse is academic (source-critical, philological) rather than liturgical. Some scholars still opt for Adonai or unvocalized YHWH out of respect for religious tradition; Hendel treats this as a matter of personal choice rather than a right/wrong issue.
Cite critical bible scholars who offer different translations for ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh
Critical Scholarship on ‘ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh (Exodus 3:14)
The phrase has no scholarly consensus — literal renderings range across “I Am That I Am,” “I Am Who I Am,” and “I Will Be What I Will Be” depending on how the imperfect verb hayah (“to be”) is read.
Nahum Sarna (JPS Torah Commentary): Sarna presents three possible literal translations — “I Am That I Am,” “I Am Who I Am,” and “I Will Be What I Will Be” — arguing the phrase evokes the name YHWH and reflects the earliest understanding of it as a verbal form of hayah, expressing either eternal, dynamic Being or the sense of “causing to be.” He ultimately reads the construction as an idem-per-idem device — God being deliberately evasive rather than giving a metaphysical definition.
William H.C. Propp (Exodus 1–18, Anchor Bible): Propp challenges the “causative” reading Sarna gestures toward, holding that “causing to be” would require reconstructing a different verbal form than what the text actually preserves — Propp favors the plain Qal (simple active) sense, “I Will Be What I Will Be,” treating the line as a self-referential, non-committal answer rather than an ontological claim.
Frank Moore Cross (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 1973; “Yahweh and the God of the Patriarchs,” HTR 55, 1962): Cross treats the Masoretic vocalization “I am he who exists” as linguistically odd for an archaic liturgical formula, noting that Hebrew idiom would more naturally produce phrasing like ‘ani hu’ ‘asher ‘ehye rather than the construction as transmitted. Building on W.F. Albright, Cross argued (following the causative/hiphil analysis) that Yahweh derives from a causative form meaning “he who causes to be” or “he who creates” — reading the name as a creator-epithet rather than a statement of self-existence.
Brevard Childs (The Book of Exodus, OTL): Childs synthesizes earlier positions, reading the ehyeh of v.14b and the fuller ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh of v.14a as statements of God’s as-yet-unspecified future intentions toward Moses and Israel — “paradoxically both an answer and a refusal to answer,” deferring explanation to God’s future acts rather than defining the divine nature.
Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (German Bible translation): Their rendering is read by later interpreters as emphasizing divine “Being” as relational presence — God’s being-there with and for the people — rather than abstract metaphysical self-existence.
Septuagint tradition (background for later Christian exegesis): The Septuagint’s egō eimi ho ōn (“I am the one who is”) reflects a Hellenistic ontological reading later carried into the Vulgate’s ego sum qui sum, a translation strand distinct from — and arguably imposing categories foreign to — the Hebrew verbal ambiguity scholars like Propp and Cross work with.
The interpretive fault line, in short, runs between:
- an existence/aseity reading (LXX, Vulgate, much of the classical theological tradition) — God as timeless Being;
- a futurity/relational reading (Propp, Buber-Rosenzweig) — “I will be what I will be,” open-ended and non-committal;
- a causative/creation reading (Albright, Cross) — “he who brings into being,” tying the name to divine creative action.
Hendel’s BAR article above sides implicitly with the causative-linguistic camp (Cross/Albright lineage) when he floats “he makes” or “he causes to be” as the probable original sense of Yahweh — though he flags that classical Hebrew itself had already lost track of the name’s etymology by the time Exodus 3 was composed, which is why the text plays on sound (‘ehyeh / Yahweh) rather than offering a clean gloss.
What does James Tabor say?
I [Claude.ai] checked TaborBlog directly (jamestabor.com) and didn’t find a post where he offers his own philological rendering of ‘ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh itself. What I did find is his consistent editorial practice: across his work he generally translates from the RSV but consciously renders the divine personal name as “Yahweh” rather than “the LORD,” explicitly noting this substitution in his own works. He’s also written favorably about Bible editions that retain “Yahweh” in the text, expressing hope that translations don’t get pressured into abandoning it in favor of “LORD.”
So Tabor’s stance is a restoration-of-the-name position — he’s not weighing in on the ehyeh asher ehyeh etymology debate (Propp vs. Cross vs. Sarna) so much as insisting the personal name Yahweh itself be visible in translation rather than obscured behind “LORD,” consistent with Hendel’s point about the difference between historical/critical usage and devotional convention.
If you have a specific Tabor paper, blog post, or PDF where he does engage the grammatical question directly, upload it and I’ll pull the exact wording — that’s not something surfacing in general web search of his site.
Bart Ehrman’s Treatment of ‘ehyeh ‘ăšer ‘ehyeh
Ehrman doesn’t offer a novel philological translation of the phrase the way Propp or Cross do — his engagement with Exodus 3:14 comes from the historian’s angle, focused on what the passage means for the divine name and its later Christological reception rather than on parsing the Hebrew verb form itself.
On the name and the Angel of the LORD: Ehrman treats the Exodus 3 burning bush scene as a case where “the Angel of the LORD” speaks to Moses — a figure so fully representative of Yahweh that his words carry Yahweh’s own authority, even though the angel is not, strictly, identical with Yahweh himself. This is central to his broader argument that early Christians read this angelic mediator figure as the pre-incarnate Christ — Justin Martyr and others identified this “Angel of the LORD” who delivered God’s message with full divine authority in the Genesis and Exodus patriarchal narratives as Christ appearing before his human birth.
On the “I Am” wordplay and John 8:58: Ehrman connects Exodus 3:14 directly to the Johannine “I am” sayings. He notes that when Moses asks God’s name at the burning bush, God replies “I Am Who I Am… say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you'” (Exodus 3:14), and that this backdrop is what makes Jesus’s “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) so striking — the Jewish audience in the narrative has no trouble grasping that Jesus is claiming the divine name for himself. In one blog exchange he affirms directly that Jesus’s “I Am” statement in John 8:58 is “claiming the name/authority of God.” Bart D. Ehrman
But — crucially — Ehrman separates authority from identity. This is really his interpretive contribution: he insists that Jesus taking on the divine name/authority does not mean Jesus is Yahweh in a literal, identical sense — being “one” (unified, equal in authority) is not the same as being “identical.” In his reading, the risen Christ is given the name that is above every name by God the Father (Philippians 2), meaning Yahweh remains the Father exclusively, while Jesus is elevated at his exaltation to equal authority, not made ontologically identical with YHWH.
So where Propp, Cross, and Sarna debate is grammatical/etymological — what the Hebrew verb form of ehyeh originally meant — Ehrman’s contribution to this conversation is reception-historical: he reads Exodus 3:14 mainly through the lens of how it was later mobilized in early Christology (the Angel of YHWH tradition, the Johannine “I am” sayings, Philippians 2’s exaltation Christology) rather than adjudicating the underlying Hebrew philology himself.
This fits the trajectory you’ve already been tracking with Bazzana/Fredriksen on exaltation Christology and intermediary figures — Ehrman is doing the same move here: treating “I Am” less as a fixed metaphysical claim in the Hebrew text and more as a title/authority formula that later tradition (Second Temple angelology → Johannine Christology) picks up and redeploys.
