God answers Moses’ accusation not with a rebuke but with his Name. To “you have not delivered your people at all” (5:23) the reply is “NOW you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh” — twice “with a strong hand,” and the second time it is Pharaoh who will drive them out. The complaint is not scolded; it is answered.

⚠ The crux (v3): “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty (El Shaddai); but by my name Jehovah I did not make myself known to them.” Yet Genesis has the patriarchs using the name freely — Jehovah tells Abram “I am Jehovah who brought you out of Ur” (15:7), and as early as Genesis 4:26 “men began to call on the name of Jehovah.” This is one of the most discussed verses in the Torah. Three readings, each with a real pedigree:

• The KNOWING reading — “made myself known” means known by EXPERIENCE, not merely pronounced. The patriarchs had the syllables; they never saw the covenant-keeping power the Name stands for. In Hebrew, to know a name regularly means to know the character it carries; what is new here is not the word but the acts about to prove it.

• The EDITORIAL reading — Genesis uses the Name proleptically: the narrator’s own word for God, written later, set in earlier mouths. (The same phenomenon as “Dan” in Genesis 14:14, centuries before the tribe was named, which this library flags in its own place.)

• The SOURCE reading — the standard critical account assigns this verse to the Priestly source, which holds the Name was first revealed to Moses, while another source uses it from creation onward. It is one of the pillars on which the Documentary Hypothesis was built.

The library prints the text and lays the readings out with their pedigrees; it does not cast a vote. KJV “but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them”; the ASV keeps “Jehovah” likewise.

The SEVEN “I WILL”s (vv6-8). The speech is framed “I am Jehovah” at both ends, and between them stand seven first-person promises: I will BRING OUT, I will DELIVER, I will REDEEM (with an outstretched arm), I will TAKE you to myself for a people, I will BE to you a God, I will BRING you into the land, I will GIVE it to you as a possession. It is the fullest statement of redemption in the Torah, and verse 7 is the covenant formula in one line: a people for me, a God for you. ⚠ The first four verbs are the traditional basis of the FOUR CUPS of the Passover seder — a Jewish reading of this verse that has shaped the Passover table for two millennia, and, through it, the cup Jesus lifted.

⚠ The most poignant verse in the chapter. Moses delivers the greatest promise in the book — and “they did not listen to Moses, from SHORTNESS OF SPIRIT (kotzer ruach) and from cruel bondage.” It is not quite unbelief; it is breathlessness. The crushed cannot take in good news. The oppression has done its deepest work: it has made them unable to hope, so that the word of deliverance arrives and finds no room. KJV “for anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage.”

And Moses’ old objection returns in a new form: “I am of UNCIRCUMCISED LIPS” (aral sefatayim) — lips as if unfit, unconsecrated, blocked; the same image the Bible uses for an uncircumcised ear or heart. His logic is bleak and reasonable: if his own people will not hear him, why would Pharaoh? God’s answer is not an argument but a commission (v13).

The narrative stops dead for a family tree — and the shape of it tells you why. It begins dutifully with Reuben and Simeon, Jacob’s first two sons, and then arrives at LEVI and simply stays there: Kohath → Amram → Aaron and Moses, then Aaron’s sons and his grandson Phinehas. It never returns to the other nine tribes. This is not a census; it is a set of CREDENTIALS, inserted at the exact moment two men are about to stand before Pharaoh and, afterward, before Israel as prophet and priest. It establishes the line that will hold the high priesthood, and answers the question the story has raised: who are these men?

⚠ Two details the text records without embarrassment. Amram married “Jochebed his father’s sister” (v20) — an aunt-nephew marriage the later law will forbid outright (Leviticus 18:12). The narrator states it plainly, as he states Jacob’s marriage to two sisters, because the law had not yet been given. And Korah appears among the Kohathites (v21) — the same Korah who will lead the great rebellion of Numbers 16 — listed here, without comment, in the priestly family tree. The genealogy that certifies Moses and Aaron also quietly names the man who will challenge them.

The last three verses repeat verses 10-12 almost word for word: Jehovah speaks, Moses objects with his uncircumcised lips. ⚠ This is not a doublet or a copyist’s error but a recognized Hebrew narrative device — a resumptive repetition, which picks the story back up at the point where the long genealogy interrupted it, the way a speaker restates his last sentence after an aside. The story now stands exactly where verse 13 left it, with the credentials established and the objection still on the table — and chapter 7 can open with God’s answer to it: “See, I have made you as God to Pharaoh.”