What's In A Name - Exodus 6

6:1-30 - It’s obvious that Moses is distressed about how this whole situation has gone down, he feels guilty and incredibly inadequate and he just doesn’t understand why Pharaoh didn’t just let the people go like God said that he would. God answers him basically saying, “It’s all part of the plan.” This is honestly exactly what I would have needed to hear. Interestingly, when reassuring Moses that this is all going according to plan, he notes that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “but my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.” This goes back to TB’s point of the importance of knowing a god’s name in order to have power and control over that god as was believed anciently. TB suggests that this is God’s way of revealing Himself little by little to the people until the ultimate culmination of Jesus Christ coming, saying, “The next to the last revealed manifestation of God that we read about in the Bible, is Yeshua. And, Jesus made the relationship between God and man almost as personal as it gets: He became one of us, walked among us, and shared the woes of fleshly human existence with us.” The IM however, suggests something a little bit different, in that perhaps this phrase was meant to be an rhetorical question that was lost in text-to-speech translation. The IM says, “The Prophet Joseph Smith rendered this passage as follows: ‘And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob. I am the Lord God Almighty; the Lord JEHOVAH. And was not my name known unto them?”

God reminds Moses that this mission of his isn’t just a project that God has decided to finally work on, but in fact fulfilling a covenant that God Himself had made with Moses’ progenitors. He further tells Moses to go back to the people that now hate him so much and assure them that God will “bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage.” But additionally, they will now be the people of this particular God and will serve him.

It seems to me that, while religion obviously plays a huge role in this ancient society, it really seems to be the people who dictate the gods. If they don’t like their current ones, they choose something else, if they can trick their gods into revealing something about themselves then the power dynamic between god and servant reverses and suddenly the gods have to do what the person wants. This seems to be a new dynamic between god and human where the god is all powerful and the human must obey and do what they say. If I had believe that the opposite was true, then it might be a hard sell because how would I trust that this God would actually be reasonable or work for my good.

I wouldn’t want to be subject to a madman who happens to also be a god. There is a lot of trust that needs to be built here in order for the people to truly understand but the power and obligations that come with being one of Jehovah’s chosen people. This trust and understanding had been eroded for centuries and in very cyclic fashion, so what’s about to go down in Egypt with the Hebrews might be on the same cosmic significance scale as the flood at the time of Noah. It’s going to, and needs to, cause a significant mindset shift.

God tells Moses to go back and assure the people that this is all part of the plan and that God is still going to keep his word, even if it appears to be having a setback. The people are in so much “anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage,” that they don’t care what Moses has to say. And God further commands Moses to go back to Moses and tell him to “let the children of Israel go out of this land.” Moses begs God to consider that he has “uncircumcised lips,” but God spoke to both Moses and Aaron, “and gave them charge unto the children of Israel, and unto Pharaoh kind of Egypt, to bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt.”

What Moses doesn’t understand, and what we don’t understand either mostly, if that God doesn’t need us to do His work, he is fully capable of conveying his own message. There’s a concept in business that you can’t say the wrong thing to the right person, and that’s exactly what happens in God’s case, God will cause the right person to hear and see and feel exactly what He wants for them and we are basically irrelevant.

There is now a half chapter worth of genealogy that I don’t really understand it’s importance or why it is right here in the middle of this chapter, but from what I can gather, the point of all that is to demonstrate through lineage that Moses and Aaron are from a very specific clan in the tribe of Levi, meaning that they had the right requirements for fulfilling the tasks that God wanted them to do. It’s important to keep in mind that supposed Moses is the one who wrote this out, so like Nephi justifying his rebuking of his older brothers, Moses might have wanted to ensure the reader that he was acting with the proper authority in his respective realm of assignment.