go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.” Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”. And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’.” Then Moses answered, “But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’.” (…) But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” But he said, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.” Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, “Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart. (…) He shall speak for you to the people, and he shall be your mouth, and you shall be as God to him. (see Exodus 3:1–7; 3:10–14; 4:1; 4:10–16) 7 Ingenious simplicity In the blend of stories and legends of theOld Testament, a wonderful message was unexpectedly being revealed. Not only did Moses hear it from God, but he also succeeded in delivering it to the entire nation. TheOld Testament states quite clearly what God chose for Himself in reply to Moses’s question about His true name: The answer was, “I AM”. Or, in the extended version (perhaps from a different source), it was “I am that I am” or, in the modern English version: “I am who I am.” It was brilliant and yet so simple. No one had succeeded, nor ever would succeed in building an idol to compete with the “I am” simplicity of God. An idol always had to have something extra, some specific quality, and this “extra” was always its weakness. No other name can be compared to God’s “I am”, since anything else is derived from “I am”: “I am” will always be the first. There is “I am” at the beginning of the whole world. And when we go back to God from anywhere in the world, every journey to Him must somehow end up in the intimate experience of God’s “I am”. To record God’s name “I am that I am” in the Hebrew back then, only four consonants YHWH [Yahweh] sufficed. For the ease of correct reading, vowels began to be marked in the Bible much later. For the people of Israel, this true name of God is so sacred that, from as early as the second century BC, nobody even dared to pronounce it. To this day, “Adonai” has been used instead. Respect is a beautiful thing. That is why it makes sense even to people today. 74 (6) Petr Pavlík
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