The bush that burns and is not consumed. Moses — now the son-in-law shepherding Jethro's flock (the priest of Midian is Reuel in chapter 2, Jethro from here on; see his entry) — leads the sheep to Horeb, "the mountain of God," the height the book also calls Sinai. There the angel of Jehovah (mal'akh YHWH) appears in a flame from within a thornbush (seneh — a word that sounds like Sinai itself). The marvel is not the fire but its restraint: the bush "was burning with fire, yet was not consumed." And the account slides, as such scenes do, straight from the angel (v2) to Jehovah and God speaking in the first person (vv4-6): the same seam this translation met at the Bible's first "angel of Jehovah," Hagar's well (16:7) — the messenger who so carries the Sender that the text stops distinguishing them.

"Moses, Moses" — "Here I am." God calls the doubled name — as he called "Abraham, Abraham!" with the knife raised (22:11) — and Moses answers with Abraham's own word, hineni, "Here I am." Then: "take off your sandals … for the place on which you are standing is holy ground" (admat-qodesh). This is the first patch of earth in the Bible called qodesh, "holy" — and it is admah, the "ground" Adam was formed from (2:7): ordinary soil made holy only by the Presence standing on it. Then the self-introduction that fixes everything to come — "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" — the very words Jesus would later press to prove the resurrection: God "is not the God of the dead but of the living" (Matthew 22:32). Moses hides his face.

Seen, heard, known. The four verbs that closed chapter 2 — God heard, remembered, saw, knew (2:24-25) — now come back in the first person, out of the fire: "I have surely seen the affliction … I have heard their outcry … I know their pains." Then the verb that answers them: "I have come down (va-ered) to rescue them" — the same "coming down" as at Babel (11:5), but this time to save, not to scatter — and to bring them to "a land flowing with milk and honey," the phrase's first appearance in scripture. The six peoples of the land are named; the commission is given: "I will send you to Pharaoh."

The answer is not Moses. Moses' first objection — "Who am I?" — is met not with a résumé but with a presence: "Because I will be with you" (ki ehyeh immakh). It does not matter who Moses is; it matters Who goes with him. And that little word ehyeh, "I will be," is planted here on purpose: two verses on, it becomes the Name (v14). The sign God gives is a strange one — a promise that can only be verified after obedience: "when you bring the people out, you will serve God on this mountain." The verb is avad — the very word for the slavery of 1:14 (avodah): Israel serves Pharaoh, and is freed not into idleness but to serve God. The exodus is a change of masters.

The sentence the whole Bible turns on. Moses asks the question everything has been building toward: "What is his name?" And God answers with three of the most examined words in any language: ehyeh asher ehyeh. The verb is hayah, "to be," in the Hebrew imperfect — a form that reaches across our tenses at once: I am, I will be, I will prove to be. So the shelf splits, honestly, by which edge of that verb each translator heard. The KJV, Geneva, and Douay give the timeless "I AM THAT I AM"; the ASV prints the same but footnotes the grammar — "Or, I WILL BE THAT I WILL BE"; the NWT, leaning into the imperfect's forward motion, renders it "I Will Become What I Choose to Become" — God's freedom to be whatever the deliverance will require. The ancient Greek translators heard it as pure being — egō eimi ho ōn, "I am THE ONE WHO IS" — the very title John's Revelation hands back to Christ, "him who is and who was and who is coming" (Rev 1:8).

Why this translation reads "I will be." The deciding clue is two verses back: God has just said ehyeh immakh, "I will be with you" (v12). To render the same word "I AM" here would sever the very thread the Hebrew ties — the presence promised to Moses is the Name given to Israel. So this translation keeps them one: "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE," and "I WILL BE has sent me to you" — the traditional "I AM" kept in view, but the living, forward-tilting verb kept audible.

"I will be" — or "I will become what I choose to become"? The NWT's bolder rendering deserves weighing on its own, because it is not careless — it is the strongest case for hearing the Name as a declaration of sovereign freedom, and the Hebrew genuinely supports it. The construction is what grammarians call idem per idem — the same verb repeated across a relative, "I-will-be that I-will-be" — and its nearest cousin is one book later: "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and show mercy to whom I show mercy" (Exodus 33:19), plainly a God who reserves the right to be who he will be, on his own terms. So "I will become what I choose to become" gains real force: it makes that self-determination explicit and lands like a thunderclap.

Why this translation still keeps the barer form. Three things are spent to gain that thunderclap. First, "choose" is added — there is no verb for choosing in the Hebrew; both halves are simply ehyeh, "I will be." Second, it breaks the mirror: the whole power of ehyeh … ehyeh is that the two words are identical — swap in "will be … choose to become" and the echo is gone. Third, and most costly, it blurs the bridge to the Name: ehyeh ("I will be") is the first person of the very verb YHWH is the third person of (v15), and keeping it one consistent word is what lets a reader watch Presence (v12, "I will be with you") become Name become Jehovah. And there is a quieter paradox worth naming: the barer "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE" is actually the freer of the two. By naming no mechanism it holds all three ancient readings open at once — self-existence (the "I AM" of pure being, the Greek Bible's "the One who is"), faithful constancy ("I will be what I have always been"), and dynamic becoming ("I will be whatever the rescue requires"). To spell out "choose to become" is to make one of those three vivid and let the other two fade — more force for that one reading, a little less openness across all of them. So this translation keeps the tautology whole and lets the note, not the text, carry the sovereign-freedom weight the NWT hears. (A middle path, "I WILL BECOME WHAT I WILL BECOME," would keep both the mirror and the motion — but "become" will not travel back to v12's "I will be with you," so "be" wins for consistency.)

And then the Name itself. God says it again, in the third person this time (v15): Jehovah (YHWH) — for the four-letter Name is, by the oldest and most widely held reading, the third-person of that very verb: "He is / He will be" (or "He causes to be"). God names himself in the first person, Ehyeh, "I will be"; his people name him in the third, YHWH, "He will be." And God stakes everything on it: "this is my name forever, and this is my memorial from generation to generation" — the verse that authorizes reading the Name as a name and not a title. This is why this whole translation prints Jehovah where most Bibles hide it behind "the LORD" (see the YHWH and Jehovah entries): the Name he asked to be remembered by, said aloud.

The password of the redemption. Moses is to gather the elders with a phrase they already know as the promise: paqod paqadti etkhem, "I have surely attended to you" (the emphatic doubling of paqad, the verb of God "visiting" Sarah with a son, 21:1). It is the very word dying Joseph left as Israel's password out of Egypt — "God will surely attend to you, and carry my bones up from here" (Genesis 50:24-25). The elders "will listen to your voice" — obedience, shama be-qol, the thing the last kings of Judah refused (Jeremiah 22:21). The first ask to Pharaoh is modest — a three days' journey to sacrifice — and God tells Moses plainly it will fail: "the king will not let you go — no, not except by a mighty hand" (yad chazaqah, the opening half of the great redemption-formula, "a mighty hand and an outstretched arm," which Jeremiah will one day turn against Judah).

Wonders — and the stripping of Egypt. "I will strike Egypt with all my wonders" (niflaotai) — the very "wondrous works" Zedekiah's officials would one day beg Jeremiah to see repeated, only to learn the Wonder-worker had changed sides (21:2); here they are first promised. And the exodus ends in a reversal with teeth: the slaves will leave with silver, gold, and clothing, "and you will strip Egypt bare." The Hebrew hides a hard pun — the verb natsal: God "comes down to rescue (le-hatsil) them" in v8, and the people "strip / plunder (nitsaltem) Egypt" in v22 — the same root for the deliverance and for the spoil. It is the quiet fulfillment of a word spoken to Abram in the dark four centuries before: "afterward they will come out with great possessions" (15:14).