The word is הָיָה (hayah), the Hebrew verb “to be” — and in its first-person form, אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh), it stands at the center of the most enigmatic self-disclosure in all of scripture. On the side of a mountain in Midian, Moses asks God for a name to carry back to Israel, and God answers: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh asher ehyeh). English Bibles render it “I AM WHO I AM,” and the capitalized “I AM” has become, in the popular imagination, the divine name. The name God gives is built directly out of the verb “to be.” God is the one who is — and from this same root comes the four-letter name יהוה (YHWH) that God gives in the very next verse, the name so holy that observant Jews to this day won’t pronounce it aloud.

But ehyeh isn’t quite the static English “I am,” and both books are careful to say so. The form Hebrew uses here is for incomplete, unfinished action; it leans at least as much toward the future. It can just as well be translated “I will be what I will be.” The name is less a frozen “I AM” than a promise — I will be there; I will be what I will be. The verb carries time-flexibility that English flattens.

And there’s a second precision both books insist on against the popular reading. When Greek-speaking Jews translated Exodus into the Septuagint — the Bible John’s first audience actually used — they did not render the burning-bush name as a bare ἐγὼ εἰμί (egō eimi). They rendered it ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν (egō eimi ho ōn), “I am the One Who Is,” and the name God then tells Moses to carry to the Israelites is just the back half: ὁ ὤν (ho ōn), “He Who Is.” So the name, in the Greek text everyone in the temple would have known, is ho ōn — not egō eimi. If Jesus in John 8:58 were quoting the burning bush, you’d expect egō eimi ho ōn. He says only egō eimi. So the flat claim “Jesus is quoting Exodus 3:14” turns out to be the weakest form of the divine-name reading, because the words don’t match the name in the Greek the room knew.

The stronger anchor runs not directly through ehyeh but through Isaiah’s ani hu, “I am he,” which the Septuagint rendered with the bare egō eimi Jesus actually speaks. So hayah/ehyeh stands behind the whole conversation — the verb of being that names God at the bush and lies beneath YHWH itself — but the link to Jesus’ words is indirect, mediated through Isaiah rather than quoted from Exodus.

What the first audience heard in ehyeh was the God who simply is — and will be — naming himself out of the fire from the verb of existence itself: the name behind the holy name, the deep source of every later “I am” without being, in the Greek, its exact quotation.