‘I Will Be Who I Will Be’ (Exod. 3:14). Portrait of a Deity that Would be Nameless and Imageless

This paper addresses the problematic character of the Jewish god’s name. For much of Jewish history the name Yahweh was considered unutterable; the Hebrew Bible represents Yahweh himself as forbidding the misuse of his name after he has revealed it to Moses, though it represents him as being called by several secondary names as well, none of them straightforward. The author argues that a narrative portrait can still be reconstructed in which the Hebrew god gains a certain mystique from having a multiplicity of names and from the fact that his true name is mostly hidden.