The God of Israel is the God of the future tense.

[When Moses] encounters God at the burning bush, God summons him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, but Moses is reluctant. Who am I, he asks, to be worthy of such a task? God reassures him, and then Moses asks, Who are you? When the Israelites ask, who has sent you, what shall I say? God replies in a cryptic three word phrase, Ehyeh asher ehyeh (Ex. 3: 14).

It is fascinating to see how Christian Bibles translate this clause. Here are some recent examples:

I am who I am.

I am what I am.

I am that I am.

I am – that is who I am.

These are all mistranslations, and the error is there from the beginning. In Greek,  Ehyeh asher ehyeh became ego eimi ho on, and in Latin, ego sum qui sum: ‘I am he who is.’ To early and medieval Christians alike, this was God’s way of describing himself as ‘Being-itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, understood as the subsisting act of all existing.’ The mistake of all these translations is obvious to the merest beginner in Hebrew. The phrase means, ‘I will be what I will be.’ The verb does not use the present tense…

God does not describe himself as the non-Jewish translations would have it. ‘I am that I am’ is a translation that owes everything to the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece, and nothing to the thought of ancient Israel. The God of pure being, first cause, prime mover, necessary existence, is the god of the philosophers, not the God of the prophets.

What then is the meaning of ‘I will be what I will be’? What this means is that God cannot be predicted or controlled. He cannot be confined to categories or known in advance. He is telling Moses, ‘You cannot know how I will appear until I appear; how I will act until I act. My mercy, my compassion, my strategic interventions into history, cannot be controlled or foretold. I will be what, when and how I choose to be. I am the God of the radically unknowable future, the God of surprises. You will know me when you see me, but not before.’

To be sure, in one sense, the future is connected to the past. God keeps his promises. That is an essential element of Jewish faith. But this very fact reveals the difference between predictability on the one hand, and faithfulness on the other. Objects fall, gas expands, particles combine: these things are predictable. But people freely honour obligations they have undertaken because they are faithful. That is the difference God never fails to teach Moses and the prophets.

God’s name tells us that he is not an entity knowable by philosophy or science, deducible from the past. God awaits us in the unknown and unknowable future. That is the first stage of the argument: the God of Israel is the God of the future tense.

Excerpted from: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”k (1948-2020) was the former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, and the International 929 president.