The Name Over the Mountain

It is still dark when Moses begins to climb again, with two blank stone tablets in his arms that this time he has cut out himself. The first two, written by the finger of God, lie in pieces at the foot of the mountain, the covenant broken in stone, just as it had in fact already been broken below. Yet he climbs again. Below lies the camp, where the smell of burnt gold still hangs between the tents. God had shown him a cleft in the rock and promised one thing: I will let My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the Name YHWH. Now, on the bare summit, in the first gray light, Moses waits for that Name.

God comes down in a cloud, passes by him, and lays His hand over the cleft where the man crouches. With His own hand the Immeasurable One shields a human being from too much God, so that he will not perish from sheer glory. As He passes by, He speaks, and these are the words with which God, once in all of history, speaks Himself out from beginning to end:

"And YHWH passed before his face and proclaimed: YHWH, YHWH! God, compassionate and gracious, patient and rich in steadfast love and faithfulness, who keeps steadfast love for thousands, who carries iniquity, transgression, and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, who visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation."

A human being asked to see God, and God answers with a self-portrait in which there is not a word about power. Nothing about the sea He split, nothing about the mountains that melt, nothing about the stars He calls by name. God, who could have named anything, calls Himself compassionate, gracious, patient, faithful, and carrying. Four, five times the word for love falls before a single word about justice arrives. This is how His heart is built. Grace first, more of it and longer; only then, more briefly, the indispensable: but who will by no means clear the guilty.

The first word is rachum, compassionate. It comes from rechem, the womb, and its plural, rachamim, becomes Scripture's ordinary word for mercy. So God begins His self-portrait with a word from a woman's body. It is the mercy of a mother who carried the child beneath her heart for nine months, before it could do anything or deserve anything, and in whom something turns over the moment it cries. With that word God introduces Himself to a people who have just betrayed Him.

Twice the word falls on which the rest of Scripture will keep building: chesed. This book renders it "steadfast love," and even that is too narrow, because the word can hardly be translated. It is a covenant word. Unfold it and you find loyalty and faithfulness in it, goodness, mercy, grace, love, and reliability, all at once. In the temple it became a refrain that Israel sang 26 times in a row: "for His steadfast love endures forever" (Ps 136). The prophets look for a measure for it and find none. The fixed order of day and night would sooner fall apart (Jer 33:20–26); the mountains would sooner depart (Isa 54:10). It resembles the compassion of a father for his children (Ps 103:13), and it still holds on where a mother might forget her nursing child (Isa 49:15). Jeremiah even sets it beside the infatuation of the beginning: "I remember the steadfast love of your youth, the love of your bridal days, when you followed Me in the wilderness" (Jer 2:2). It is not a feeling that flares up and dies down. It is a love that has bound itself and stays, and for that very reason it can also punish, like a bridegroom who wants to win his bride back rather than settle accounts with her (Isa 54:7–8). On this mountain, above the betrayal, God says that He keeps that love, for thousands.

Then comes the word Moses understands better than anyone. Last night he hauled two stone tablets up the mountain, and here he hears that God carries something heavier: iniquity, transgression, and sin. The verb is nasa, to lift up and carry away, the verb for a load someone takes on his shoulders. God does not forgive by pretending the guilt is light. He lifts it up and takes it with Him, and He makes that part of His Name: nose ʿavon, He who carries guilt.

Only then does justice come, and it belongs. A God who only forgives is an indifferent bystander and no Father; whoever lets his child get away with everything does not love him. Justice is the backbone of grace, a Father who does not wave sin away, because He takes the sinner too seriously. This is what holiness looks like in this God: so pure that evil finds no home with Him, and so loving that He will not leave evil standing beside the one He loves. Yet the measure is unequal. Justice reaches three, four generations; chesed reaches to thousands. Whoever reverses the order is left with a tyrant. Whoever reads it as God speaks it is left with the gospel, and sees in His long patience a time of grace, a delay with a purpose, so that the guilty may turn and live.

This sounds over the shards of the first tablets, over a camp still in mourning, and not on a high feast day in the temple. God proclaims Who He is at the moment the people deserve Him least. That is how He still says it: not only once things are going well for you, but right over your betrayal.

Seven verses later God names yet another Name, and it is heard less often. "You shall not bow down to any other god, for YHWH, Jealous is His Name; a jealous God is He" (Exod 34:14). The Hebrew word is qanna, and English has no good home for it. It is jealous and zealous at once, the glow of someone who burns for what is his and cannot bear to watch the beloved throw herself away. In the Old Testament it is said only of God. It is the same mountain and the same morning, and compassionate and jealous are not opposites; the second is the glow beneath the first. The Song of Songs puts the two side by side in a single breath: "Strong as death is love, relentless as the grave is jealousy; its flames are flames of fire, a flame of Yah" (Song 8:6).

Moses does not wait for the cloud to lift. He hurries, the text says, bows to the ground, and worships (Exod 34:8). The text says no more about what goes on inside him; his face lies on the stone of the summit. He had asked to see God's face, he received His Name, and the Name proved enough to fall down before. After 40 days he comes down with the new tablets in his hands, and below they shrink back, because the skin of his face is shining. He had spoken with God, and it showed. Only he himself did not know it (Exod 34:29–30).

This is the Name over the mountain, and the rest of Scripture will keep singing it back. He is more powerful than everything that exists, and He uses that power to bend down over the one who betrayed Him. There was never a god, not in Egypt, not in Babylon, not in Canaan, who opened his heart over the betrayal of his own people and said: I am compassionate, and I will not leave you to another.

A note on the source text. The proclamation, following Exodus 34:5–7 (Masoretic Text); Exodus 33–34 follows the order of Genesis 15:8–21: "by what shall I know" (בַּמֶּה + ידע, in the Torah only Genesis 15:8 and Exodus 33:16), man covered while God passes by, "behold, I make a covenant" (34:10); the second ascent with the hand-cut tablets: 34:1–4; the passing-by in the cloud: 34:5–6; Moses' worship: 34:8; the shining face: 34:29–30. Rachum and rechem; chesed: Psalm 136; Jeremiah 33:20–26; Isaiah 54:7–10; Psalm 103:13; Isaiah 49:15; Jeremiah 2:2. Nose ʿavon: 34:7; cf. Micah 7:18. The second Name, "Jealous": 34:14; cf. Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 4:24; 5:9; 6:15; Joshua 24:19; Nahum 1:2; Song of Songs 8:6; Zechariah 1:14–15; 2 Corinthians 11:2. Quotations of the Name: Numbers 14:18; Psalm 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Nehemiah 9:17; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nahum 1:3. Patience as a time of grace: Ezekiel 33:11; Romans 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9. The divine Name rendered as YHWH. חֶסֶד is rendered "steadfast love," and "steadfast love and faithfulness" where it stands beside emet.