וַיֹּ֨אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֜ה אֶל־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֗ים הִנֵּ֨ה אָנֹכִ֣י בָא֮ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵל֒ וְאָמַרְתִּ֣י לָהֶ֔ם אֱלֹהֵ֥י אֲבוֹתֵיכֶ֖ם שְׁלָחַ֣נִי אֲלֵיכֶ֑ם וְאָֽמְרוּ־לִ֣י מַה־שְּׁמ֔וֹ מָ֥ה אֹמַ֖ר אֲלֵהֶֽם׃
Moses said to God, “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘By which name?’* what shall I say to them?”
*By which name? I.e., which aspect was manifested? Cf. Ramban; lit. “What is His name?”
(The above rendering and footnote come from the RJPS translation, an adaptation of the NJPS translation.)
Heb. מַה־שְּׁמוֹ. First, let’s consider the grammar and the nature of the reference. Moses’ use of a masculine verbal inflection and pronoun indicates only that this deity is seen as not female—not necessarily that it is seen as male. (It could be perceived as androgynous, of indeterminate sex, or as beyond sexual categorization.) The Hebrew language does not force the speaker to be more specific.
The reference is grammatically definite, as the hypothetical questioner refers to the deity whom Moses has just mentioned. But is this deity already known to the questioner, as well? Or alternatively, is this deity personally unknown to the questioner but logically required to exist?
In earlier iterations of preparing a gender-accurate translation, I took the second path, as if Moses assumes here that the Israelites will not know which deity he means when he refers to “your ancestors’ God”—and that from his grammatically masculine wording they assume that he’s referring to a male deity. That is, Moses believed that his compatriots’ sense of their ancestral deity was sketchy, and that they viewed this deity as one among many. At the time, our consultant Carol Meyers remarked that “they are using ‘god’ in a generic sense. . . . That’s why they need to know their god’s name!” (pers. comm., 9/19/03). This line of reasoning led me (following a suggestion by Susan Niditch) to change to lower case: “What is his name?”
Upon reflection, that was an unlikely (and midrashic) reading, which I can no longer support. After all, the Torah always presumes that Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs had only one patron deity. Reading in line with that presumption, Moses’ reference must be construed as situationally unique. For the Torah, it must be a given that the ancestors’ God was a known entity. (And it was not uncommon to use a generic term like אֱלֹהִים to refer to a particular deity.) What, then, does the question מַה־שְּׁמוֹ mean? Why would such a question even come up?
Rashbam opines that the issue is that Moses himself (perhaps due to his being raised in Pharaoh’s court) does not happen to know God’s “personal” name. Moses is concerned that his interlocutors may want to verify his claim to represent their deity, much as a contemporary bank’s ATM asks for a PIN number. Thus he needs to be prepared.
More persuasive is the gloss by Ramban: כלומר באי זו מדה הוא שלוח אליהם “in other words, out of which [divine] quality is [God] sending [Moses] to [the Israelites]?” For in the ancient Near East, each deity had various names, and each name reflected a particular attribute or manifestation. That basic cultural fact would have resonated here for the text’s ancient audience, in a way that contemporary readers would miss. As John Walton writes: “Moses’ question concerns which identity of the deity is pertinent to the mission on which he is being sent” (Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2006; p. 92). Thus Moses’ question means: “Which aspect of this ancestral deity of ours are you representing?”
As for rendering into English, the NJPS “What is His name?” appears to have followed Rashbam’s interpretation, while using “His” in its generic sense. In translation, however, English idiom does not call for specifying gender, unless we can be sure that Moses imagines that the Israelites think of the deity that he refers to as being male. Since we cannot be sure, there is no warrant for a gendered pronoun. In any case, Ramban’s interpretation seems more plausible as the text’s plain sense, so it has now been adopted.