Moses’s question concerns which identity of the deity is pertinent to the mission on which he is being sent. A number of names had been attached to the ancestral Deity in the founding accounts, many given on the basis of an encounter in which a particular attribute was manifest. This diversity of names is also reflected in Exodus 6:2–3, where God indicates that there were some names that had been manifest to the patriarchs but that he had not yet acted in ways that would manifest the identity bound up in the name Yahweh. His statement does not suggest that the patriarchs had never been
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