Exodus 3:14

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The context

Moses is at Horeb, before the bush that burns without being consumed; the call narrative is under way. He has objected once ("who am I that I should go?", 3:11) and now asks what to say if the elders want the name of the God who sent him.

Verse 14 is the answer, and verse 15 immediately supplies the name by which God is to be remembered, the four consonants usually written YHWH, tied to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is a call narrative with a sign (3:12), not a treatise on being; its concern is who sends Moses and whether he can be counted on.

The words

Ehyeh asher ehyeh — traditionally "I am who I am." The verb is hayah, "to be, to become," and ehyeh is its first-person imperfect, which in Hebrew can carry future force; "I will be what I will be" is grammatically the more natural rendering, and it fits the promise of 3:12, "I will be with you." The traditional English follows the Greek and Latin versions, not the Hebrew tense.

Verse 15 gives the third-person form, the name forever. How ehyeh relates to those consonants is disputed: the name reads either as "he is" or, causatively, "he causes to be." The vocalization was not preserved; what is read in the synagogue is adonai, "my lord."

What this passage establishes

God names himself to Moses, and the name is bound to his presence with Moses and to the patriarchs. The self-designation asserts God's own existence and freedom: he is who he is, not who Israel would prefer him to be. The passage makes the name a matter of worship and memory, not curiosity.

What it does not establish

It does not by itself teach aseity as later theology defined it. The claim that God's essence is self-existent being is a later development, articulated with Greek philosophical tools by Augustine and Aquinas. The Hebrew sentence is compatible with it, but does not state it.

It does not settle the meaning or the pronunciation of the name. Four consonants survive without vowels. The explanation in 3:14 is a wordplay on the name, not a philological derivation, and scholars propose several accounts of its original sense.

It does not yield the Trinity. Christian writers use the verse within a Trinitarian doctrine of God, but nothing in the sentence distinguishes persons. The doctrine rests on the whole canon; this verse witnesses to the name, not the processions.

How the church has read it

Augustine returns repeatedly to "I am who I am" as the name of true being over against things that change (Confessions, On the Trinity), and Aquinas argues (Summa, I, q.13) that "he who is" is God's most proper name. The Greek Old Testament rendered the phrase ho on, "the one who is," and that form passed into Christian liturgy and the book of Revelation. The echo in John 8:58 runs through the Greek, not the Hebrew.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

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Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.