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NASB | Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "You shall say this to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" |
Subject: God refers to himself as "The great I Am |
Bible Note: Part 2 Although the natural English translations differ, there are two contexts of this kind in which Jesus uses the words eg eimi alone to identify himself: in 6:20, where the disciples are afraid of the apparition they see walking on the water, and Jesus reassures them by identifying himself, quite naturally, with these words, which translate into English as 'It is 1'; and in 18:5, whale Jesus acknowledges that he is Jesus of Nazareth by speaking the same words, which are naturally translated into English as 'I am he'. The syntactic difference between them is that in the former ego is the complement, the unexpressed subject being something equivalent to 'what you see', and in the latter ego is the subject, the unexpressed complement being 'Jesus of Nazareth'. In both these passages ego eimi is the natural Greek response in the circumstances, as may be seen in 9:9, where the man cured of blindness uses exactly the same words to acknowledge his identity. The dramatic reaction of the arresting party in 18:6 is readily explained if we note that the confident authority of Jesus's presence was such that he defeated the merchants in the temple (2:15), and he simply walked away when the crowd was intent on throwing him over the brow of the hill near Nazareth (Luke 4:28-30). The verb 'to be' is used differently, in what is presumably its basic meaning of 'be in existence', in John 8:58: prin Abraam genesthai ego eimi,5 which would be most naturally translated 'I have been in existence since before Abraham was bom',6 if it were not for the obsession with the simple words 'I am'. If we take the Greek words in their natural meaning, as we surely should, the claim to have been in existence for so long is in itself a staggering one, quite enough to provoke the crowd's violent reaction. For the emphasis on the words 'I am' we need to look back to God's words to Moses in Exodus 3:14, 'I am who I am. This is what you arc to say to the Israelites: "I am has sent me to you".' The passage in its Hebrew form has been discussed by many commentators as something of a problem, with possibilities that the verb could mean 'I am', 'I will be', 'I become', or 'I will become', and the pronoun 'that', 'who', 'what', or even 'because'. Some see a need to emend the text, and some stress various critical principles as basic to its interpretation. A few refer to the Septuagint translation of the passage as relevant for understanding it.7 Now the Septuagint was the translation done for the benefit of the increasing number of Greek-speaking Jews a couple of centuries earlier, so naturally it is the version of the Old Testament that is normally referred to in the New Testament, and certainly the one most likely to be known to the early readers of John's Gospel. Its translation of Exodus 3:14 follows the sense (as understood by the Jewish translators) rather than the exact form of the Hebrew: ego eimi ho an ... Ho an apestalke me, which translates into English literally as 'I am the being one',' and 'the being one has sent me'. Now the words ego eimi here are the emphatic pronoun and the copula as in most of the passages cited above; and ho an represents a relative clause which in its first occurrence would be hos eimi and in its second occurrence would be hos esti,9 but the most natural translation into English of both would be 'the one who is (who really exists)',' the verb having its basic |