"...And my name YHWH I did not make known to them"

Parshat Vaera

This week we'll focus on a verse that had in the past troubled me a lot.  It was a question that I searched a while for an answer for, but never found a good one.  It turns out there is a pretty damn good answer to this question, but it was not one that any Rabbi was willing to offer me.

I will remark on the outset that this post will require discussion of the tetragrammaton, which I will represent by YHWH.  I realize that this must be off-putting to some religious people who might stumble across the blog, but it is far too cumbersome to euphemize the name.

The Burning Question

This parsha picks up right in the midle of the conversation between God and Moshe (Moses).  We won't go any farther than the first two verses, which read (Exod 6:2-3):

2 And God spoke unto Moses, and said unto him: 'I am the LORD (YHWH); 3 and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by My name YHWH I made Me not known to them.

Verse 3 gave the title to the blog post, as I would translate it, and is the source of the problem.  Bonus points to you if you picked up on it already. If you haven't, the problem is that this verse is a blatant contradiction with various previous stories.  God says here that he never told Avraham, Yitzchak, or Yaakov, about his name YHWH, instead appearing as El Shaddai only.

The first question to ask is does God use El Shaddai in conversations with the patriarchs?  The answer is yes.

1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him: 'I am El Shaddai; walk before Me, and be thou wholehearted. (Gen 17:1)

10 And God said unto him: 'Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name'; and He called his name Israel. 11 And God said unto him: 'I am God Almighty. Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins; (Gen 35:10-11)

Both Avraham and Yaakov also use El Shaddai in their own conversations.  But what about the other half?  Does God use the name YHWH.  Unfortunately, for me, I remembered from being a ba'al korei (Torah reader) that he did not too many weeks ago.  There is one clear example of God introducing himself to a patriarch as YHWH.

12 And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. 13 And, behold, the LORD stood beside him, and said: 'I am the LORD (YHWH), the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. (Gen 28:12-13)

However, there are also numerous times where the Patriarchs appear to know this name.  A couple of examples will suffice:

unto the place of the altar, which he had made there at the first; and Abram called there on the name of the LORD (YHWH) (Gen: 13:4)

And Abraham planted a tamarisk-tree in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the LORD (YHWH), the Everlasting God. (Gen 21:33)

And he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the LORD (YHWH), and pitched his tent there; and there Isaac's servants digged a well. (Gen 26:25)

And he (Yaakov) came near, and kissed him (Yitzchak). And he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said: See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD (YHWH) hath blessed. (Gen 27:27)

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: 'Surely the LORD (YHWH) is in this place; and I knew it not.' (Gen 28:16)

And many more.  Not only do the Patriarchs seem to be very familiar with this name, Even the wicked Lavan (Laban) seems to know it:

And Laban said unto him (Yaakov): 'If now I have found favour in thine eyes--I have observed the signs, and the LORD (YHWH) hath blessed me for thy sake.'  (Gen 30:27)

And to top it all off, we have this cryptic verse all the way back in Gen 4:26 which seems to indicate that the name was known publicly to everyone in the 3rd generation!

And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enosh; then began men to call upon the name of the LORD (YHWH). (Gen 4:26)

A Blatant Contradiction?

We have here what appears to be a blatant contradiction.  Furthermore, it's one that ancient Rabbis could not have failed to notice.  However, despite this, I was not able to find any good explanations. I'm not going to devote too much to traditional answers, if you want, you can read more about them here (Part 3).

Most of the answers in the linked article, and the ones I heard from Rabbis capable of answering the question relied on either tortured readings of the verse, or some kind of esoteric meaning of the word shem (name).  For the second explanation, it meant that it wasn't the literal name, YHWH, that God was talking about, but rather some sort of alternative concept, that could very well mean whatever you want it to, as long as it didn't make more contradictions.  This is a standard tactic in traditional explanations to resolve contradictions.  You just force an alternative interpretation on one of the verses and, voila, the contradiction is resolved.

However, there is a much better answer, but before we get there, we'll divert a bit to give some background.

How the Documentary Hypothesis was Formed

One of the first steps on the road to formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis was noticing that there were multiple stories where the same thing appeared to occur twice.  We've already seen some instances of this, such as the multiple stories of a Patriarch pretending his wife was his sister in a foreign land.  Or the multiple times Yaakov was renamed as Yisrael, or Beth-el was named [1].

However, there was another piece of evidence that was a bit curious.  It seemed that in many of the repeating stories in the book of Bereishit (Genesis), each version used a different name for God.  Some used elohim, which is a generic word for "god," and can be viewed as a sort of title.  The other used YHWH, the tetragrammaton, which was more akin to a personal name.  This discovery was made simultaneously by Astruc, Eichhorn and Witter in the 19th century [2].   The next step was to separate the stories into multiple authors or sources.  One source used one name, the other used a different name.

Chances are, if your yeshivah, synagogue, or any other religious based institution you frequented addressed the Documentary Hypothesis at all, the view they gave was one of multiple authors who just happened to prefer using one name of God or the other.  This was certainly the description I was given, and I've seen it described as such today among Orthodox Jews.  However, it's incredibly incorrect, or rather, it represents a formative view at the very beginning when they were just figuring out what was going on. The verse we were discussing provides the key as to why one author would prefer to use YHWH an another would eschew it.

What the Documentary Hypothesis Actually Says about the Names of God

What the Documentary Hypothesis actually says is not that each source just happened to pick a name of God they liked and ran with it, but rather there was an important theological reason for their choices.  One of the authors believed that the name YHWH was hidden from mankind until it was revealed to Moshe at the burning bush.  In fact, this is told to us explicitly in Exod. 6:3, quoted above.  The other author thought that YHWH was known to mankind from the beginning, or at least from Gen 4:26. 

This also explains why the name YHWH gets used frequently in all stories after Exod 6:3, including in both parts of later doublets (For example, the quails stories in Exod 16 and Num, 11).  Furthermore there are multiple other idiosyncrasies that can be used to differentiate the sources.  (Friedman or Kugel in the references link are good sources to learn about these.)   Regardless, the narrative makes sense without resorting to tortured readings provided you are ok with there being multiple storylines or traditions.

The simple story I've painted in the last two paragraphs isn't the actual opinion held today, even with the version of the Documentary Hypothesis held by proponents like Friedman.  For them there are four authors, with two authors holding the view that YHWH was not known before Moshe.  Although, one of them, does not appear much in the Patriarchal stories.  The fourth author is confined entirely to the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) and comprises the first 31 chapters of that book.

Even then, there are some cracks in this four author story (again Whybray in the references section can point out some problems.)  But the general idea of there being multiple storylines holds across nearly all modern secular scholars.  The contradictions are far too many, and the coincidences are far too strong to argue for anything else.  In a couple weeks we'll see that even defenders of traditional readings commonly quoted by religious Jews are forced to admit the presence of contradictions arising from multiple sources, even if they weren't actual written documents.

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1. For example, check the posts in previous weeks here or here. ^

1. See Friedman, "Who Wrote the Bible" Summit 1987, p. 23. ^