Semi-Random Musings (38)

Exodus 6:2 plainly states that while God appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty (El Shaddai), he did not make himself known to them by his personal name YHWH. This confuses some readers. One asks, “Why does God say he didn’t reveal his name ‘Yahweh’, when he obviously glaringly did so in Genesis, many, many times?”

Some of the answers one gets to such a question on a public forum like Stack Exchange are truly horrendous. One respondent suggests the writer of the Exodus passage believed it, but the writer of the Genesis passages believed differently. Let’s just say the apostle Paul would beg to differ, as would the Lord Jesus.

The most obvious rejoinder (if we are trying to be polite) is that it’s a completely unnecessary speculative resolution. God did not “glaringly” reveal his name in Genesis even once, despite its appearance 163 times in the book, mostly in authorial commentary on the actions of its characters. For example, the writer of Genesis reveals that men began to “call upon the name of the Lord” [YHWH] as early as the birth of Enosh in Genesis 4, and the patriarchs did so multiple times thereafter. This does not remotely imply the people who interacted with God in Genesis actually invoked his personal name when they did so, or that they even knew it. (For example, when Hagar named the Lord [YHWH], she called him El Roi, not YHWH.) If the Holy Spirit were as pedantic as his critics, I suppose he may have suggested a more technically accurate rendering for those 163 occasions, something like “men began to call upon the name of the God we now know as YHWH”. Personally, I’m glad he didn’t.

The writer of Exodus 6 may or may not have been the same person as the writer of Genesis 4, but both accounts were compiled many years after the events described in them. We may reasonably suppose their author(s) drew on some combination of oral tradition, written history and divine revelation. Some speculate the editors of the Pentateuch did not complete a definitive version until around 400 BC. Personally, I believe it was much earlier, perhaps a full millennium prior, as multitudes of OT references to the written Law indicate was certainly possible. But the point is that both accounts were written with their author(s) fully aware of the name YHWH, which God had revealed to Moses. It would have been entirely natural to use that name in both narratives because that was the name by which the audiences for these books knew the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There is no reason to imagine the writer or writers should have felt compelled to avoid using the name YHWH in these narratives because it had yet to be revealed in the time periods they covered.

Forgive me if this point is way too obvious to our average reader. It was not obvious to the average reader of Stack Exchange.

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Speaking of the name YHWH, Sunday’s post was about Genesis 39, one of the pre-Exodus passages that uses God’s personal name repeatedly. “The Lord” [YHWH] is mentioned eight times in twenty-three verses, and every one is authorial commentary about what God did on Joseph’s behalf that could only have been known with certainty by way of divine revelation. We need not for a moment imagine that Joseph knew the personal name of God, though he was surely aware that God was prospering him. In fact, when Joseph mentions God to Potiphar’s wife (“How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”), the name he uses is the generic Elohim, not YHWH, the only time in the chapter that a name for God appears in dialogue.

But even had Joseph been familiar with the name YHWH, he would never have used it when speaking to an Egyptian. It would have been entirely meaningless to her. I can very much relate to Joseph in his vain struggle to communicate to Potiphar’s wife the reason he could not possibly consider having sex with her. Our world does not know our God and has no concept of a personal relationship with our Creator and Savior. It sees deity as mere abstraction. How can we possibly explain loyalty, let alone sacrifice, on God’s behalf or because of moral principle? It’s like trying to describe sight to a blind man. When I have tried to explain to my unsaved friends why I choose to live the way I do, I often run into the same stunned incomprehension as Potiphar’s wife no doubt experienced when Joseph politely spurned her sexual advances.

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Well, that didn’t take long! The Washington Post just declared Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff a “progressive sex symbol”. If you’ve seen pictures of Emhoff (I hadn’t), you’ll be forgiven for finding The Post’s characterization bizarre, to say the least. What does this potential “First Gentleman” bring to the table that is so appealing to the masses? He is “secure enough in his own masculinity to sometimes prioritize his wife’s ambitions over his own”. That makes him “the working woman’s ideal partner today”.

Say what?

Forgive me for jumping back to Genesis for the umpteenth time today. The “one flesh” concept implies a unified purpose before God mediated through the male (“the head of a wife is her husband”), as I’ve discussed here. God tasked Adam with gardening, then created Eve to help. The first woman had no independent mandate from God, and the first recorded instance when Adam looked to her for direction resulted in the human race’s departure from the will of God and expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Our world unapologetically lauds the inversion of God’s design for the sexes. It’s only an observation, but I’ve yet to see a single marriage in which a husband catering to his wife’s ambitions ended well for either party, or for the marriage. Loving her, absolutely. Learning to understand her, certainly. Showing her honor, indubitably. Prioritizing her ambitions? I don’t think so. Moreover, women have great difficulty respecting men who have less sense of direction and purpose than they do.

If it’s true, as is frequently speculated, that Kamala Harris is no more than the public face for the final few months of Barack Obama’s third term as US president and, if she’s REALLY lucky, the proxy through whom he plans his fourth run, then our culture’s latest symbol of modern maleness is a prop propping up another prop. That doesn’t bode well for men, women or the culture.