Читать книгу Salvation Story - David R. Froemming - Страница 11

1 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. 7 Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

Moses encounters a God whose name in Hebrew is Eheyeh Asher Eheyeh. Eheyeh is the first person of the imperfect tense of the Hebrew verb “to be.”28 The translation really is more like “I am becoming that which is becoming.” God is not finalized like something that was made, but rather a living process—“a becoming.” Only completed things have names. This living God cannot have a name. Idols have names.29

This nameless God of becoming is akin to the meaning of word, “debar” in Hebrew, which is “event—happening.” Thus in Moses’ encounter with God we discover a process that is taking place to engage myth, the story of human power that is created by humans, a thing, an idol. God’s Word, God’s event is now encountering the power of Pharaoh. The salvation story in the Old Testament is the emergence of this nameless God who starts to shatter the power of human myth and the oppression and violence behind it.

This is why in Hebrew tradition the name for God is not spoken and the Hebrew word Adonai (my Lord) is used. It was not easy for the Israelites to keep straight their nameless God from the idols all around them. And this nameless God is not kept straight from the many idols of powers today by biblical literalists. This nameless God is much more akin to evolution, which we can behold, but not control, through our human power, nor be masters over it. Richard Dawkins, though a great writer on evolution, did not make this distinction, and as a result engaged biblical literalists in an entire book titled The God Delusion.30 In the end neither Dawkins nor the biblical literalists grasp the emergence of this event—this nameless God who is the liberation from our violence, who is not the power of idols and human myths.

28. Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods, 26.

29. Ibid., 27.

30. Dawkins, The God Delusion.