One difficulty is determining exactly what the answer is. What is God’s
name? Does it come in verse 14 or verse 15? If it comes in verse 14, then
God’s name is “I AM WHO I AM” or simply “I AM.” But in that case God’s
name is a verb, which would be highly unusual. It seems more likely that
the divine name is given in verse 15, where God identifies himself as “the
LORD.” “LORD” is the special name for God that occurs more than 5,000
times in the Old Testament. One place it occurs is in the Song of Moses,
where it shows how Moses himself understood God’s answer to his question:
“The LORD is his name” (Exod. 15:3b).
The name “LORD” is sometimes called the tetragrammaton because in
Hebrew it consists of four letters: YHWH. The Jews considered these letters
to be so sacred that later some of them even refused to pronounce the
Lord’s name, for fear of taking it in vain. Perhaps that is why the proper
way to pronounce the divine name has been forgotten (part of the problem
too is that the most ancient Hebrew manuscripts do not contain any vowels,
only consonants). The King James Version of the Bible sometimes writes it
out as “Jehovah,” although this is based on a misunderstanding of Hebrew
vowels that dates back to the medieval church. The New International
Version simply prints it as “LORD” in capital and small capital letters.
Probably the proper way to say God’s special name was something like
“Yahweh.” But even if its pronunciation is uncertain, God’s name itself has
never been forgotten. The French Huguenots preserved it in their insignia:
a burning bush imprinted with the four Hebrew letters that spell the divine
name.
