On Daily Hebrew, H.H. Hardy has a post that asks whether the divine name was first revealed to the Israelites in Exodus (as Exod. 6:2-3 suggests) or whether the name was known to the patriarchs. Although he says that this is a debate among scholars, this is actually a debate among different layers of the Pentateuch. As the students in my Pentateuch class could tell you (having just taking a final that included this question), the problem is one between the J source and the P source.

The J sources uses the divine name from the very beginning of the story in Genesis. According to J, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all knew the divine name. What was revealed at Sinai in Exodus 3 was not the divine name, but the meaning of the divine name. When Moses asks God who to say has sent him, God responds that Yahweh has sent him. If this name were unknown to the Israelites prior to Exodus 3, God’s response would make no sense.

The story in Exodus 6, on the other hand, comes from P. P says that the patriarchs did not know the divine name. Instead, they knew God as El Shaddai. In the P theology, the divine name is first revealed to Moses at Mt. Sinai. But this contradicts the J material in Genesis, which already has the divine name known.

When J and P are edited together by the H redactor, the combination leads to tension between the two ideas. In other words, the problem is not a modern one; it is an ancient one.

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