Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Exodus 3:14
I AM, or I WILL BE. The Hebrew is one form and it carries both.
Exodus 3:14, in every translation this tool compares.
I am here. I will be here. English makes you pick a time before you can finish the sentence. Now imagine a verb form that is both, that means something like I am-and-go-on-being here, and that a speaker could use without ever choosing. Hebrew has that form. English does not, so a translator has to choose for you.
Because this is the verse where God names himself, and the name becomes the divine name used nearly seven thousand times in the Old Testament. Every other word in the sentence is ordinary. This one decides whether the name is a statement about being or a promise about presence, and the answer shapes how you read the rest of the Pentateuch.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.
Nearly every English Bible reads I AM. The NET, NRSV and JPS all footnote I WILL BE. The RSV put I AM WHO I AM in the text and I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE in the margin.
הָיָה hayah · H1961
Ehyeh is the first person singular imperfective of hayah, to be. Hebrew verbs do not mark time the way English verbs do. They mark whether an action is viewed as complete or incomplete. The imperfective covers what is going on now and what is not yet finished, which in English has to become either a present tense or a future tense. The form itself refuses to choose.
There's no English verb form that is present and future at once. A translator has to pick a tense, and picking one deletes the other. The Hebrew reader was never asked to pick.
When a Hebrew verb sits in a promise or a self-description and your translations split present against future, you are looking at the imperfective. The split is not a disagreement about the words. It is two attempts to carry one form that English cannot hold.
I AM makes the name a statement about God's being, which is how the Greek of the Septuagint took it and how most of Christian theology has read it. I WILL BE makes it a promise attached to the next sentence, where God says he will be with Moses. Both are in the grammar. The chapter itself pushes toward the promise, since the same verb form appears in verse 12 as I will be with you.
- G. H. Parke-Taylor, Yahweh: The Divine Name in the Bible, 51, on ehyeh as both I am and I will be
- The Septuagint renders ego eimi ho on, I am the one who is
- NET Bible translators' notes at Exodus 3:14
