The identification of YHWH as the God Christians name Father, Son and Holy Spirit remains a challenging subject matter for several reasons. One primary reason is the governing hermeneutical norms for modern criticism collapse the sensus literalis with the historical sense of Scripture.1 Evangelical scholars tend to limit the historical sense to the named author of Scripture, where such applies or can be responsibly reconstructed. Critical scholarship expands the historical sense to include various levels of tradition and redaction-critical analysis. Despite the differences, evangelical and critical hermeneutical approaches share the interpretative instincts inherited from the rise of historical consciousness in the early eighteenth century.2
The previous claim is not intended as a pejorative comment per se. The benefits of modern criticism for the lexical and historical contextualization of Scripture aid modern readers in multiple ways. Scripture’s so-called depth dimension, a textual phenomenon valorized in the modern period, is not necessarily at odds with a confessional understanding of Scripture because it reflects the dynamically present character of the divine word to subsequent generations of readers/hearers. This textual dynamic is present within the Scripture’s own self-witness. Jeremiah, for example, appeals to Micah’s prophecy for the sake of bolstering his own claims (Jer. 26:18). The middôt (attributes) of God heralded in Exodus 34:6–7 weave their way through the Minor Prophets at critical, interpretative junctures.3 While compositional history and textual reception are related but distinct matters, the fact remains that Scripture listens to Scripture in its own compositional history. These insights into Scripture’s own internal cross-association – intertextuality is the term de jour – help the modern reader in multiple ways, the least of which is an appreciation for how Scripture’s tradition-building process reveals a canon consciousness in the texts themselves. On this account, canon is not an extrinsic imposition of later doctrinal formulae onto Scripture’s self-witness but emerges from the text’s own internal forces.
All the historical advances of modernity notwithstanding, trinitarian readings of the Old Testament run into hermeneutical brick walls. How can texts written before the incarnation refer to metaphysical realities beyond the conceptual horizons of the human authors and tradents of the Old Testament? For example, was Moses a trinitarian? These kinds of questions are not new, raising their heads at various moments in the church’s struggle to name its God. The hermeneutical question is straightforward. Is the Old Testament’s trinitarian character grounded in the exegesis of Scripture itself or does it amount to a homiletical or hermeneutical palimpsest imposed onto rather than drawn from Scripture’s own self-witness? Moreover, if as Christians we affirm the triune character of our God, then a question regarding the identity of YHWH in the Old Testament follows. Is YHWH a persona of the divine essence or the ousia itself? Put in other terms, is YHWH the Father or the divine essence of three personae?
Admittedly, these questions are enormous and of some consequence. The present chapter does not portend towards an exhaustive answer, but will make initial steps towards clarifying what it means to understand YHWH as triune and to read the Old Testament witness accordingly. Our attention turns first to the identity of Israel’s God, YHWH.
The question ‘Who is God?’ registers somewhere near the heart of the Old Testament’s theological subject matter.4 When Moses encounters God at the burning bush, the matter of identifying his name comes to the fore (Exod. 3:13–14, my tr.). ‘When they ask for your name, how shall I answer them?’ God’s reply to Moses’ straightforward question remains a disputed matter to this day. ’ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh. Tell them ’ehyeh (‘I am’ or ‘I will be’) has sent you.
Coming to terms with the significance of this encounter and the connotative force of the name is no mean task. Along with the lxx and the majority of the Christian interpretative tradition – for good measure I will add Maimonides’s name to the list – the revelation of God’s name in Exodus 3 speaks of his essence or being, his pure existence or his eternal presence where future and past enfold into God’s eternal present.5 Existence resides at the heart of God’s ‘godness’.6 He is.
This essentialist reading of God’s nature has come under critical scrutiny in twentieth-century theology, but it is beyond the purview of this chapter to chase this rabbit too far. Put simply, essentialist categories for answering the ‘Who is God?’ question have had to make room for narrative approaches where God’s identity and relationship to his creation are more closely linked with the divine economy itself: a bottom up approach, if you will. The lines dividing God’s eternal self (immanence) from his creative/redemptive revelation of himself in time (economic) blur in this narratival move. But all are not persuaded by the recent trends. The title of a recent monograph makes the point sharply: God Is Not a Story.7
A close reading of Exodus 3 within the larger frame of Exodus’s name theology may help chart a course between these alternatives. Or, put more precisely, Exodus 3 may bring essentialist and narratival concerns into a reciprocal relationship. God’s relating to his creatures in acts of creation, revelation and redemption – the stuff of God’s economy – flows from the essential character of his being. In Aquinas’s frame of understanding, the eternal processions of God (immanence) are revealed, even if analogically, in the temporal mission (economy) of God. These two facets remain distinct for an important theological reason, to wit the maintaining of the Creator–creature distinction. Yet they remain distinct in an insoluble and reciprocating relation to one another. Gilles Emery frames the matter as follows: ‘In the mission or temporal processions, explains Saint Thomas, the divine person who is sent forth impresses on the soul of the saints a likeness of his eternal property.’8
I will leave the fine-tuning of these theological categories to those whose pay grade matches the subject matter.9 Notwithstanding, these categories emerging from speculative theology or Christian dogmatics provide helpful, even necessary, hermeneutical keys. Within Exodus’s theological movement as a book, God’s revelation of his name emerges from the complex dynamic of God’s will to redeem his people. God’s revealed self takes a particular clarifying turn in Exodus as God’s eternal identity is enmeshed with his redemptive, covenantal relation to his people.
At the wrestling match on the banks of the Jabbok River, a narrative I will look at closely in due course, Jacob asks for the name of his supernatural opponent (Gen. 32). The response is sharp: ‘What is that to you?’ Admittedly, the episode is strange on multiple fronts. But the unfolding of the divine name within the Pentateuch is specifically linked to the exodus event. While the Jabbok narrative may have a complex religious-historical backstory regarding some of its enigmatic elements, the Pentateuchal context of the story renders the divine reticence to give his name a theological significance. The connotative significance of the name YHWH is linked with the exodus episode, and Jacob is not privy to such knowledge yet.
In a similar vein to the Jacob narrative at Jabbok is Exodus 6:2–3, a text that is central to the name theology of the book of Exodus:
God also spoke to Moses and said to him, ‘I am the Lord [YHWH]. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty [El Elyon], but by my name “The Lord” I did not make myself known to them.’ (Exod. 6:2–3)10
This verse persists as a source critic’s darling. The rationale goes something like the following: the patriarchs knew only the name El or Elohim, with YHWH appearing later in Israel’s religious-historical development; the Canaanite religious instincts became borrowed capital for Israel’s own developing religion or Yahwism. This religious-historical narrative is told often enough to resist full repeating here.11 In brief, however, Abraham had no concept of the name YHWH.
While elements of this religious-historical narrative may ring true, the canonical presentation differs at crucial points. The patriarchal history is rife with references to YHWH. One need only recall Abraham’s encounter at the oaks of Mamre in Genesis 18 to problematize an account of the divine name as presented in certain quarters of critical theory. According to the canonical presentation, Abraham knew YHWH. So what is Exodus 6:3 claiming?
The revealing of the divine name in Exodus 3 and 6 locates God’s self-determination to reveal himself within the nexus of his redemptive actions. It is not that Abraham did not know the Semitic phonemes of the divine name. Nevertheless, Abraham’s position within the divine economy before the exodus event limits his knowledge of the name’s soteric significance, especially given this crucial and defining episode in Israel’s covenantal history.12 This moment in the divine economy renders the divine name and its significance in a fuller, redemptive frame particular to this moment of divine self-unveiling. By way of extension a similar claim may be made about the last verse of Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17:26, ‘I made your name known to them, and I will make it known’.13 The disciples were not unaware of the divine name. But this singular moment in the divine economy of redemption attaches a significance to the divine name unknown till this moment of self-unveiling.
It comes, then, as little surprise to find discourse pertaining to the divine name towards the end of the Exodus narrative as well (Exod. 32 – 34). The golden calf episode marks another crucial turning point in the divine economy. The either/or character of the Decalogue and God’s covenantal claims on Israel are now tested: ‘I will take you as my people, and I will be your God’ (Exod. 6:7). Israel’s worship of the golden calf breaks the covenantal claim ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ When God interrupts his conversation with Moses midstream on Sinai’s heights, the reader of Exodus realizes the stakes are high. God makes use of the cold and distant second person possessive pronoun and tells Moses to go to ‘your people’ because they have offended against my law (Exod. 32:7). The either/or moment arrives. Yet, Moses intercedes. God in his mercy relents. Immediately following God’s relenting, Moses asks the unthinkable: he asks to see the glory of God. YHWH then in theophanic glory passes by and in the next chapter gives a detailed exposition of the significance of his own name:
The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed,
The Lord, the Lord . . .
(Exod. 34:6)
YHWH’s proclamation of his own name is the revelation of his glory. The thirteen middôt of God listed by YHWH himself (Exod. 34:6–7) reveal the character of the divine name, and in so doing reveal the character of YHWH. He is merciful and severe. Moreover, his mercy far outweighs his severity. The name of YHWH entails existence, but does so in a redemptive and revelatory context where his being is made available by his own unveiling. Moreover, this self-unveiling locates God’s being as merciful and severe, the two necessarily conjoined with God’s mercy shaping our understanding of his severity. By way of extension the intertextual appeal to Exodus 34:6–7 that runs throughout the Minor Prophets reveals Israel’s continual struggle to come to terms with YHWH’s mercy and severity. Like Jacob at the Jabbok River, Israel’s covenantal existence endures as a wrangling with their merciful and severe God, even till the break of day (Hos. 12:1–6).
The revealing of the divine name and the redemptive context of this self-unveiling are of some consequence when coming to terms with the Trinity and the Old Testament. YHWH’s mission to create and redeem does not exhaust the scope of God’s being. As various episodes within the Old Testament attest, the being of God resists domestication of any sort. Moses’ fearful encounter with YHWH in Exodus 4:24–26 is a case in point. Nevertheless, God’s revealed being remains ensconced within a salvific context where his mercy and severity come to the fore.14 As mentioned above, the missions of God in time (creation and redemption) reveal the eternal processions of God in his subsisting relations. The two remain distinct yet inseparable.
A peculiar facet of the identity of YHWH, merciful and severe, emerges in the Old Testament’s textual witness. In certain streams of tradition YHWH has the ability to differentiate himself from himself without fragmenting his deity or divine being. Benjamin Sommer identifies this feature of YHWH as ‘the divine fluidity model’.15 For example, YHWH’s location at Teman or Hebron may be particular to that place so that YHWH’s presence there differs somewhat from YHWH at Jerusalem. Absalom’s trek back to Hebron to make vows to YHWH there when Jerusalem was just around the corner may make some sense of this religious dynamic (2 Sam. 15:7).16 The evidence in the Old Testament for the distinction between YHWH’s self at various locations is scant. Therefore, building theological or metaphysical conclusions on this basis remains thin. The relationship between YHWH and his mal’āk (messenger/angel), however, is another matter.
The relationship between YHWH and the Angel of YHWH is of material consequence when attending to the trinitarian character of the Old Testament. In some instances the Angel of YHWH resists any identification with YHWH’s being (cf. 2 Sam. 24:16–18). In these cases the Angel of YHWH exists as a messenger or herald sent at YHWH’s bequest to do his bidding. In other instances, however, differentiating between YHWH and his mal’āk becomes more problematic and, one should add, more interesting. As Gerhard von Rad claimed:
The most interesting are those which are not really able to distinguish between Jahweh and his angel, and which therefore do not take the angel as only a messenger, but as a manifestation of Jahweh himself. The angel of Jahweh is Jahweh himself, appearing to human beings in human form.17
In line with Sommer’s ‘divine fluidity model’ certain traditions within the Old Testament narrate the mal’āk’s identity in such a way that differentiating him from YHWH becomes difficult, if not impossible. Herman Bavinck states:
So much is clear: that in the Mal’akh Yahweh who is pre-eminently worthy of that name, God (esp. his Word) is present in a very special sense. This is very evident from the fact that though distinct from Jehovah this Angel of Jehovah bears the same name, has the same power, effects the same deliverance, dispenses the same blessings, and is the object of the same adoration.18
The plurality of persons within a unified divine essence remains an Old Testament problem, leaning against the notion that such trinitarian logic is foisted onto the text rather than drawn from it.
The texts supporting the plurality of persons within a unity of divine being are the usual suspects. Rublev’s notable icon of the Trinity depicts Abraham’s encounter with YHWH in Genesis 18. In the narrative movement of this text the three visitors become a single persona as one figure emerges who speaks directly with Abraham as YHWH embodied. Later in the Abrahamic narratives the Angel of YHWH halts the sacrificial knife and commences to speak to Abraham in YHWH’s first person voice (Gen. 22:16). A similar dynamic between the mal’āk and YHWH occurs in the calling of Gideon (Judg. 6:17–40). The blessing of Jacob in Genesis 48:15–16 links together mal’āk and ’ĕlōhîm [God] in synonymous parallelism. Along this line of enquiry one fascinating text emerges as central to the discussion at hand because of its own reception in the compositional history of the Old Testament itself – Jacob’s wrestling match with a ‘man’ (’îš) in Genesis 32:22–32.
The wrestling match at the river Jabbok continues to bewilder and capture the imagination of readers because the text is fraught with enigmatic elements. Jacob sends his family and servants across the southern banks of the river to its northern side. ‘Jacob was left alone’ (32:24). Why? One practical reason is the thwarting effect such a herd of folks might have had on Esau’s violent anger. From a narrative standpoint, Jacob’s remaining behind and alone provides the opportunity for this providential sparring match with ‘a man’.19 Von Rad makes much of the mental strain and focus Jacob suffered because of his unavoidable future engagement with Esau.20 And yet out of nowhere on the riverbanks of the Jabbok a man appears, and this event is far more dangerous than any encounter with Esau.
The two men begin to wrestle. Again we are left in enigmatic territory. Why did they begin to wrestle? We are not told. Nevertheless, Jacob (ya‘ăqōb) wrestles (yē’ābēq) with a man by the river Jabbok (yabbōq) until the break of dawn. The assonance of the Hebrew words has the poetic effect of emphasizing the centrality of this episode as it pertains to Jacob’s name and its alteration. For Jacob, the defining moment of his life was going to happen the next day when he met Esau. For YHWH, however, the defining moment of Jacob’s life is this encounter by the Jabbok. Here Jacob strives with God, prevails/perseveres and receives a blessing, for ever altering his identity and his gait. No longer is he the ‘heel-grabber’. Now he is Israel, one who has striven with God. He has a limp for the rest of his life to prove it.
The details of this text necessitate critical and creative enquiry. For example, how can Jacob strive with God and prevail? Certain Jewish interpreters identify this man as the protective angel of Esau for obvious theological reasons – prevailing over God is inconceivable and theologically offensive. Other interpretative questions emerge. Why does ‘the man’ need to depart before the breaking of dawn? Why does the man refuse to give his name? Interpretative questions such as these remain the material of scholarly discussion and disagreement. Pursuing their answers removes us from our enquiry, but, admittedly, the text is riddled with enigmatic elements. Despite these uncertain textual elements, the interpretative framework provided by Hosea 12:4–6 is of some consequence to our trinitarian investigation.
Hosea 12:4 identifies ‘the man’ with whom Jacob wrestles as a mal’āk. This identification comes as no surprise because it is not out of the ordinary for an angel to be predicated with the term ’îš (man).21 The ‘confusion’ arises in verse 6 when the prophet also identifies the figure with whom Jacob wrestled as YHWH. As Sommer clarifies:
The reason for the apparent confusion between God and angel in these verses from Hosea is simply that both passages, Hosea 12 and Genesis 32, reflect a belief that the selves of an angel and the God YHWH could overlap or that a small-scale fragment of YHWH can be termed a mal’akh.22
The Hosea text understands the figure of Genesis 32 as at the same time both an angel and YHWH.23
Perhaps Hosea’s interpretation of Jacob at Jabbok hovers in the material world of speculative, Christian theology with its distinction between person and essence. I am not claiming Hosea was thinking in these terms. Therefore, I am not basing the argument on human, authorial intentionality. Nevertheless, ontology and epistemology or the being of God and our understanding of God’s being are related but distinct matters. One should not expect Hosea, Moses or David, for example, to be conceptually aware of the full ontological implications of their prophetic words regarding the divine being. Put positively, the ontological dimension of Scripture’s witness allows the signa to be fitted properly to Scripture’s res significata, a subject matter made available by the total witness of a two-testament canon. Moreover, the distinctions made within the speculative, theological traditions of the church are made for the sake of coming to terms with the claims of Scripture’s total witness, a point Lewis Ayres and others have made persuasively.24 Distinguishing between person and essence remains at the heart of trinitarian theology and biblical interpretation.
The relation between YHWH and his mal’āk – and by extension his Spirit and Word/Wisdom – indicates an overlap of identities and a simultaneous distinction between persons.25 This biblical description reinforces the tendency of classical trinitarian thought to identify YHWH with the divine essence or being rather than with a particular hypostasis or persona of the Godhead; that is, YHWH is not identified as the Father simpliciter. Richard Muller describes the Protestant Orthodox view in the following way:
Given, moreover, that the name ‘Jehovah’ belongs to God essentialiter, absoluté, and indistincté apart from an identification or determination of the persons of the Godhead, Scripture can also apply the name and the texts in which it occurs to individual persons, namely, to Christ. The threefold glory of Isaiah 6:3 is, thus, applied to Christ by the evangelist John.26
YHWH as God’s personal name refers to the divine Godhead in its fullness, the divine essence equally shared by the three persons. As such, YHWH can be predicated on any of the divine persons without remainder. And at the same time, the name YHWH is not the sole possession/indicator of any one person. YHWH is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in their co-equal sharing of the divine essence in its fullness.27
The rise of historical consciousness in modernity brought with it many positive results for the engaging of the biblical material. Such a claim resists easy disputation. On the other hand, the reducing of the biblical material to its historical/literary origin – original author, original audience, immediate circumstances giving rise to the subject under discussion, and/or the complex tradition-building process leading to the text’s final form – runs the danger of cutting Scripture from its ontological subject matter. The hermeneutical backbone of modern criticism, in the oft-repeated phrase of Brevard Childs, altered Scripture’s status from a witness of divine revelation into a source for critical reconstruction: literary, historical or otherwise. Once the historical excavation of the text ends, whether in reconstruction of the historical or literary-critical background, attendance to the text’s literal sense concludes as well. The Christian interpreter must strain to affirm the trinitarian character of the Old Testament with these governing hermeneutical instincts deployed. YHWH’s triune identity, on this account, is a homiletical extra, not a close reading of the text itself.
The church’s interpretative tradition, on the other hand, keeps the verbal character of Scripture and its divine subject matter insolubly linked when attending to Scripture’s literal sense. To affirm the Old Testament’s trinitarian character or to identify YHWH as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are attempts at allowing the Old Testament’s own idiom to have a constraining role in the characterization of God as one in essence and three in persons. The language of Nicaea would be foreign to the intellectual horizons of Moses or Isaiah. Such formulations are waiting in time for reflection and clarification. But what must be maintained is that the formulations of Nicaea are exegetically grounded attempts to provide a theological and hermeneutical framework for Scripture’s own total witness regarding the identity of the one God with whom we have to do.
The distinction between essence and person arises in speculative theology for the sake of allowing Scripture’s total witness regarding the divine being to have his say.28 Hermeneutical assumptions governed by the anteriority of faith’s confession and commitments are present from beginning to end. Such a claim need not be denied in a feigned effort at hermeneutical neutrality. At the same time, the verbal character of the Old Testament itself is fertile soil for a trinitarian hermeneutic where the unity of the divine essence and diversity of the divine personae are affirmed, as Genesis 32:22–32 and Hosea 12:1–6 attest. In fact, the Old Testament’s own self-presentation regarding YHWH’s singularity and diversity of personae constrains the faithful reader towards this interpretative conclusion.
© Mark S. Gignilliat, 2016