Full Text for Exodus- Volume 32 - "I am the Lord" is repeated several times. Is that significant? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #32 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. I think I'm understanding something. I noticed that the phrase "I am the Lord" is repeated several times in this passage. Is that significant? >> That's great, Nick, that you noticed that. Because it really is significant. This is in a place where seeing the structure of the text really helps us to understand where the emphasis is in the passage. Here is a place where I really wish I could show you this text in Hebrew because this is easier to see in Hebrew than it is in English. But I think that we can see it in English, perhaps if we color code the words. So I'm going to put up a slide here that will have the section from Exodus 6 Verse 6 to 8. You may not be able to read it on the screen because of the size. But I'll color code the parts that you can see. And you can certainly follow along in your English text. And I think the point will be obvious enough. We'll begin by reading this again, Verse 6. "Say, therefore, to the people of Israel 'I am Yahweh. And I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will deliver you from slavery to them. And I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgement. I will take you to be my people and I will be your God. And you shall know that I am Yahweh, your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. For I am Yahweh.'" Now, when I look at this text, the thing that leaps off the page to me is that this quotation that I've just read -- and we'll ignore the first part. It's just the introduction to the quotation. The quotation itself is the important thing. This quotation begins with the phrase "I am Yahweh" or "I am the Lord" in most English translations. And then it ends with the passage -- with the phrase "I am Yahweh" or "I am the Lord." In both English and Hebrew, this is exactly the same phrase at the beginning and at the end. Now, what you may not know is that in Hebrew, this is a literary technique called bracketing. It's used most often in poetry. But you also find it in prose. And it's a way of bringing emphasis to the text. That when you bracket the text, you sort of mark off the beginning and the end of the material. And you also highlight sort of like putting these words in bold. Here on your screen I put these words in red so you can see how the first phrase of the text and the last phrase of the text are the same and serve to bracket the quotation as a whole. Now, this phrase occurs one other time in the text in the middle in Verse 7 where it says, "I will take you to be my people and I will be your God and you will know that I am Yahweh" or "I am the Lord" occurs here in the middle of the text. Now, when this happens in Hebrew, when you get a text a passage that is bracketed both at the beginning and the end with a phrase and then the same phrase is put in the middle, this is just about as much as you can do in Hebrew to emphasize something. This is sort of the Hebrew equivalent of putting it in bold and drawing two or three lines under the text to indicate how important it is. Here we put this phrase in -- you know in red on the slide in your text so that you can see that it occurs at the beginning and at the end and also in the middle of the text. So this is a very reasonably common, especially in poetry, technique that's fairly well recognized. And it's a way of highlighting the importance of this phrase in Hebrew. But there's something else I would like to mention about this text. And that is the way that this text connects the name with the redemptive task that God has undertaken. Let's look at how the name is defined, if you will, in this passage. He says, "I am Yahweh." Then what does he say about himself? "I will bring you out. I will deliver you. I will redeem you. And I will take you to be my people." Look at all of these first person verbs that follow this statement. "I am Yahweh." By the way, I am Yahweh is not a verb in Hebrew. It's actually a noun phrase. In Hebrew it's I Yahweh. And you supply the verb to be in the middle because it doesn't actually occur in the Hebrew text. But we've got this identification clause as we call it. And then all of these first person verbs that serve, in effect, to tell you what the significance of the name is. It's a way of defining who the person is. We see the same thing continues in the second part of the quotation. Although, since its shorter, there are fewer examples. He says, "I am Yahweh. I will bring you to the land that I swore to give to Abraham. And I will give it to you for a possession for I am Yahweh." Here, too, the first person verbs continue. And they are all verbs that highlight the redemptive mission of God. I will bring you out. I will deliver you. I will redeem you. I will make you my people. I will bring you to the land. And I will give it to you as a possession. This is just about as tidy a package that you could expect to get in Hebrew or in any language for that matter to emphasize not only the importance of the name Yahweh but also the significance of the name Yahweh in this context. That's why I said when we were talking about the earlier question that while in Exodus 3 the revelation of the divine name was a secondary element in the text, here in Exodus 6 the revelation of divine name is the primary element in the text and also the close connection of the divine name with the redemptive task that God has undertaken in the revelation of his name here in Exodus 6. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***