Who Is YHWH
Pharaoh answers the demand with a question — 'Who is YHWH that I should obey his voice? I do not know YHWH.' The whole plague cycle is the answer to that question, and this chapter ends not in rescue but in bricks without straw and a prophet's complaint.
The third chapter of Exodus gave Moses a name; the fifth chapter gives that name its first denial. God had revealed himself as YHWH precisely so that Israel — and finally Egypt — would know him (Exodus 3:14-15). Now Moses and Aaron walk into Pharaoh's court, deliver the demand, and Pharaoh throws the name back in their faces: מִי יְהוָה אֲשֶׁר אֶשְׁמַע בְּקֹלוֹ ... לֹא יָדַעְתִּי אֶת־יְהוָה (mi YHWH ʾasher ʾeshmaʿ be-qolo ... loʾ yadaʿti ʾet-YHWH), "Who is YHWH that I should obey his voice? ... I do not know YHWH" (Exodus 5:2). This is the chapter that opens the second act of Exodus, and it opens in defeat. The demand is refused, the bondage is intensified to bricks without straw (5:6-19), and the chapter closes on a double complaint — the Israelite foremen against Moses (5:21), and Moses against YHWH (5:22-23) — before God answers in 6:1. The text holds Pharaoh's question open on purpose. Everything that follows, from the first plague to the last, is the name being made known to a king who said he did not know it.
I. The demand and the denial (Exodus 5:1-5)
Moses and Aaron come with a word, not a request: כֹּה־אָמַר יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי (koh-ʾamar YHWH ʾelohe yisraʾel shallach ʾet-ʿammi), "Thus says YHWH, the God of Israel: Let my people go" (Exodus 5:1). The verb שָׁלַח (shalach, H7971, "send, let go") will sound seventy-four times across sixty-five verses of Exodus — both as the release-demand here and, at the chapter's bitter end, as Moses' own question, "why did you send me?" (5:22). The purpose clause is liturgical: וְיָחֹגּוּ לִי בַּמִּדְבָּר (ve-yachoggu li ba-midbar), "that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness" (5:1). The verb is חָגַג (chagag, H2287), the root of the noun חַג (chag, H2282) that names Israel's pilgrim-feasts twelve times across ten verses of Exodus. The demand is not for a vacation but for worship; the precise thing Pharaoh refuses is that YHWH's people should serve YHWH.
Pharaoh's reply is the hinge of the whole book:
וַיֹּאמֶר פַּרְעֹה מִי יְהוָה אֲשֶׁר אֶשְׁמַע בְּקֹלוֹ לְשַׁלַּח אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵל לֹא יָדַעְתִּי אֶת־יְהוָה וְגַם אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵל לֹא אֲשַׁלֵּחַ
va-yoʾmer parʿoh mi YHWH ʾasher ʾeshmaʿ be-qolo le-shallach ʾet-yisraʾel; loʾ yadaʿti ʾet-YHWH ve-gam ʾet-yisraʾel loʾ ʾashalleach
"And Pharaoh said, 'Who is YHWH that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I do not know YHWH, and moreover I will not let Israel go.'" (Exodus 5:2)
The denial is not neutral. לֹא יָדַעְתִּי (loʾ yadaʿti) is יָדַע (yadaʿ, H3045, "to know by experience, by sight") in the Qal perfect first-person singular — a flat declaration of settled, present-state ignorance. And it is willful: in the same breath Pharaoh adds וְגַם ... לֹא אֲשַׁלֵּחַ, "and moreover I will not let them go." The first clause feigns ignorance; the second admits the ignorance is a choice. The opening question carries the same defiance: אֲשֶׁר אֶשְׁמַע בְּקֹלוֹ, "that I should obey his voice," uses שָׁמַע בְּקוֹל (shamaʿ be-qol, H8085, "obey/listen to the voice of"), the Hebrew idiom for obedience rather than mere audition. The contempt is in the grammar: Pharaoh does not say he cannot hear, but that he will not comply. שָׁמַע sounds forty-nine times across forty-four verses of Exodus, and here, at the threshold, it is refused.
There is no textual escape from the harshness of this verse. The Masoretic Hebrew reads לֹא יָדַעְתִּי אֶת־יְהוָה, "I do not know YHWH," and the Septuagint — the witness that antedates Christ — renders it οὐκ οἶδα τὸν κύριον (ouk oida ton kyrion), "I do not know the Lord," with no softening of either the verb or the refusal. (The Greek expands "Israel" to "the sons of Israel" in the surrounding clause, but it renders Pharaoh's denial itself flatly.) The contempt is stable across the traditions; no version blunts it.
| Root | Strong's | Exodus 5:2 — Pharaoh's Denial | Exodus 6–14 → Ezekiel → Ezek 38:23 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יָדַעְתִּי | H3045 | לֹא יָדַ֙עְתִּי֙Exo 5:2 — Qal perfect 1cs | — (the denial that drives all below)Pharaoh, settled refusal |
| יָדְע֤וּ | H3045 | וְיָדְע֤וּ מִצְרַ֙יִם֙Exo 7:5 — Qal seq. perfect 3cp | וְיָדְע֥וּExo 14:4, 18 — Egypt at the sea |
| תֵּדַ֔ע | H3045 | בְּזֹאת תֵּדַ֔עExo 7:17 — Qal imperfect 2ms | תֵּדַ֔עExo 8:10, 8:22, 9:14, 9:29 — plague by plague |
| וִֽידַעְתֶּ֗ם | H3045 | וִֽידַעְתֶּ֗םExo 6:7 — Qal seq. perfect 2mp | וִֽידַעְתֶּ֖םExo 10:2 — Israel told to remember |
| וְיָדְעוּ | H3045 | וְיָדְעוּ כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָהEzk 6:7 — 69 verses in Ezekiel | וְיָדְעוּ כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָהEzk 38:23 — eschatological climax |
Pharaoh's "I do not know YHWH" is the negative seed of the whole plague cycle. The narrative engine of Exodus 5-14 is exactly this: the king denies knowledge of the name, and YHWH acts "so that you may know." The denial is answered by a morphological cascade — Pharaoh's settled Qal perfect at 5:2 is met by jussives and sequential perfects that multiply plague by plague: Egypt "will know" (7:5; 14:4, 18), Pharaoh "will know" (7:17; 8:10, 22; 9:14, 29), Israel "will know" (6:7; 10:2). The same pairing of knowing-and-name then becomes the signature idiom of Ezekiel. What Pharaoh denies in defiance, the rest of the canon spends thousands of verses answering.
This is why the denial is so weighty. God had already given the answer in advance. In the burning bush he had named himself אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (ʾehyeh ʾasher ʾehyeh), "I am that I am," and called YHWH "my name forever" (Exodus 3:14-15) — the subject of the third study in this series. The name was disclosed precisely so that Israel and the nations would come to know him; Pharaoh's "I do not know YHWH" is a direct rebuff of that disclosure. YHWH's own programmatic comment follows in the next chapter: בִּשְׁמִי יְהוָה לֹא נוֹדַעְתִּי לָהֶם (bi-shmi YHWH loʾ nodaʿti la-hem), "by my name YHWH I did not make myself known to them" (Exodus 6:3) — Niphal perfect, "make oneself known." The whole book is the verb יָדַע being conjugated forward.
And there is a switch in Pharaoh's hearing. Moses came in the name of "YHWH, the God of Israel" (5:1), the covenant name. Pharaoh refuses it. So Moses and Aaron try again with the designation a foreign king would recognize: אֱלֹהֵי הָעִבְרִים (ʾelohe ha-ʿivrim), "the God of the Hebrews" (5:3). The ethnic term עִבְרִי (ʿivri, H5680, "Hebrew") appears fourteen times across fourteen verses of Exodus, and it recurs through the plague speeches (7:16; 9:1, 13; 10:3) as the name Pharaoh's world can place. The covenant God of Israel and the tribal God of the Hebrews are one and the same — but Pharaoh will only learn the first name by being subdued by the second.
II. Two lords, one verb (Exodus 4:23 / 5:1 / 5:18)
The deepest collision in the chapter is buried in a single verb. Israel's slavery to Egypt and Israel's calling to YHWH are named by the same word: עָבַד (ʿavad, H5647), which spans "serve," "work," and "worship." It sounds thirty-one times across twenty-nine verses of Exodus, on both sides of the contest at once — the bondage to Pharaoh (1:13-14; 5:18) and the summons to YHWH (3:12; 4:23; 7:16; 8:1, 20; 9:1, 13; 10:3, 7). The exodus is not a movement from servitude to freedom-in-the-abstract; it is a transfer of masters, from the lord who enslaves to the Lord who is worshiped.
The collision is sharpest in the one verb both masters claim. At 4:23 YHWH says שַׁלַּח אֶת־בְּנִי וְיַעַבְדֵנִי (shallach ʾet-beni ve-yaʿavdeni), "let my son go that he may serve me" — a Qal imperfect with the first-person object suffix; at 5:18 Pharaoh says לְכוּ עִבְדוּ (lechu ʿivdu), "go, work" (Exodus 5:18) — a bare Qal imperative with no object at all. The same verb, עָבַד, carries both slavery and worship; the difference is the suffix YHWH attaches and Pharaoh omits. The entire dispute is in that suffix: YHWH demands service rendered to himself; Pharaoh demands service rendered to no named lord at all. The release-verb and the service-verb travel together — שָׁלַח and עָבַד co-occur in twelve occurrences across ten verses of Exodus, the recurring grammar of every major confrontation: let them go, that they may serve. Pharaoh grants neither.
YHWH's answer closes the loop. At 6:6 he promises וְהִצַּלְתִּי אֶתְכֶם מֵעֲבֹדָתָם (ve-hitsalti ʾetchem me-ʿavodatam), "I will deliver you from their service," where the noun עֲבֹדָה (ʿavodah, H5656) is the very word used for the bondage in 1:13-14. The deliverance is not from work as such but from working for the wrong lord. The God who says "serve me" is the God who first snatches his people out of the service that was killing them.
III. Bricks without straw (Exodus 5:6-19)
What follows the refusal is the chapter's cruelest irony: the arrival of the deliverer makes the bondage worse. The same day, Pharaoh commands the taskmasters to stop supplying straw and to hold the brick quota constant (Exodus 5:6-8). The decree is not a fresh cruelty invented out of nothing; it is a documented escalation of the bondage Exodus opened with. The vocabulary of the brick-decree reaches back deliberately into the enslavement of chapter 1.
| Vocabulary | Exo 1:8–22 — Original Bondage | Exo 5:6–19 — Intensification |
|---|---|---|
| H3843 לְבֵנָה lebēnāh "brick" | — (not yet the focus; corvée for storage cities, 1:11) | 5:7, 5:8, 5:14, 5:16, 5:18, 5:19 — "make bricks" repeated six times in fourteen verses |
| H5656 עֲבֹדָה ʿabōdāh "labor / servitude" | 1:14 — "all their labor (ʿabōdatam) with which they made them serve with harshness" | 5:9, 5:11 — "let the labor (haʿabōdah) be heavy upon the men" |
| H6531 בְּפָרֶךְ bephārekh "with harshness" | 1:13, 1:14 — "the Egyptians compelled with harshness" | — (removed: the policy has moved past harshness to impossible quotas) |
| H5065 נָגַשׂ nāgaś "taskmaster / drive" | 3:7 — YHWH has seen "their oppressors (nōgəśêhem)" | 5:6, 5:10, 5:13, 5:14 — four verses in nine verses |
| H3513 כָּבַד kābad "be heavy" | — | 5:9 — "make the labor heavy (tikh.bad) upon them" |
| H6680 צָוָה tsāwāh "command" | 1:22 — Pharaoh commands the midwives, then all his people | 5:6, 5:10 — Pharaoh commands the taskmasters and foremen |
| H5337 נָצַל nāṣal "deliver" | — | 5:23 — "you have not delivered (hitsaltā) your people at all" — the accusation that YHWH's own answer in 6:6 will reverse |
The arrival of YHWH's messenger triggers an escalation rather than a relief — the deliverer's presence is the cause of the intensification. The word for "heavy" (H3513 kābad) at 5:9 is the same root used for Pharaoh's hardened heart (9:7; 10:1) — his policy toward Israel and his policy toward YHWH are one disposition. Note also: the only two places in the entire canon where brick-making vocabulary (H3843 + H3835) appears together are Gen 11:3 (Babel) and Exo 5:7 (Egypt) — Pharaoh's brickworks are Babel reconstructed under new management.
The escalation is carried by two roles in the workforce. Above stand the נֹגְשִׂים (nogesim, from נָגַשׂ, H5065), the Egyptian "drivers" or taskmasters — a verb of coercive, crushing pressure, the word for driving animals and armies. It appears five times across five verses of Exodus (3:7; 5:6, 10, 13, 14), and four of those five are packed into this single decree. Beneath them are the שֹׁטְרִים (shoterim, H7860), the Israelite foremen, appearing five times across five verses of the chapter (5:6, 10, 14, 15, 19) — fellow Hebrews installed as middle-managers and caught between the drivers above and the workers below. When the quota cannot be met, the blow falls on them: they are beaten (5:14). The repeated drumbeat לְבֵנָה (lebenah, H3843, "brick") — six times in fourteen verses — turns the labor into a chant of impossibility: make the same number of bricks, gather your own straw. The brick itself is a theological object: the only two passages in the canon that pair "make brick" with "bricks" (the verb לָבַן, H3835, with the noun H3843) are the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:3) and Pharaoh's brickyard (Exodus 5:7). The brick is the building-block of every human empire that organizes itself against heaven.
The foremen go straight to Pharaoh and are turned away with the contemptuous "go, work" of 5:18; then they round on Moses and Aaron, "may YHWH look on you and judge" (5:21). The pattern is not new in Exodus — the people who cry out against their deliverer here are the same people who will cry out against Moses at the sea (Exodus 14:11-12). The deliverance arrives in stages, and each stage looks, at first, like a deepening of the trap.
IV. Moses' lament (Exodus 5:22-23)
The chapter does not end with the foremen's complaint. It ends with Moses', and the difference between the two is everything. The foremen turned on Moses; Moses turns to YHWH. וַיָּשָׁב מֹשֶׁה אֶל־יְהוָה (va-yashov mosheh ʾel-YHWH), "and Moses returned to YHWH" (Exodus 5:22). The lament that follows is not desertion; it is prayer. Moses brings the complaint to the only one who can answer it.
The accusation is blunt: לָמָה הֲרֵעֹתָה לָעָם הַזֶּה (lamah hareʿotah la-ʿam ha-zeh), "why have you done harm to this people?" (Exodus 5:22). The verb is רָעַע (raʿaʿ, H7489) in the Hiphil perfect second-person singular — Moses charging YHWH directly with the harm. This exact form, the Hiphil perfect 2ms leveled accusatorially at YHWH, occurs in only three verses in the whole Old Testament, all of them on the lips of a prophet in extremis. Moses coins it here. He returns to it nearly four decades later, broken by the wilderness — "why have you done harm to your servant?" (Numbers 11:11), the same form distinguished only by a final letter. And Elijah reaches for it over the widow's dead son at Zarephath (1 Kings 17:20). The complaint is not faithlessness; it is the founding grammar of how a prophet wrestles God when the promise and the present do not match.
A caution is needed here, because the lament genre is broad and the temptation is to over-read it. Jeremiah's "you have deceived me, YHWH" (Jeremiah 20:7) and Habakkuk's "how long, YHWH, shall I cry?" (Habakkuk 1:2) belong to the same family of prophetic complaint — but they do not share the verb רָעַע or its accusatory form with Moses. The connection is generic, not verbal: they are kin in tone and posture, not in lexis. The thread that genuinely binds Exodus 5:22, Numbers 11:11, and 1 Kings 17:20 is the specific Hiphil form, and it should not be inflated into a verbal allusion where only the genre is shared.
Moses' second charge sharpens the first: וְהַצֵּל לֹא־הִצַּלְתָּ אֶת־עַמֶּךָ (ve-hatsel loʾ-hitsalta ʾet-ʿammecha), "and you have not delivered your people at all" (Exodus 5:23). The construction is the Hiphil infinitive absolute followed by the finite verb of נָצַל (natsal, H5337, "snatch away, deliver") — the emphatic Hebrew form, "delivering, you have not delivered." It is a flat denial that any rescue has happened. And it is precisely this verb that YHWH picks up in his answer: וְהִצַּלְתִּי (ve-hitsalti), "and I will deliver you" (Exodus 6:6). Moses says "you have not delivered"; YHWH says "I will deliver." The lament is answered not with rebuke but with a promise in the same word. The honest complaint of the prophet is met by the patient self-commitment of God.
V. The horizon: from Egypt to the nations
Pharaoh's question does not stay in Egypt. The pairing of "knowing" and the name that Pharaoh denied becomes, in the prophets, the standard formula for what God's acts in history are for. In Ezekiel it is a signature: the pairing of יָדַע and יְהוָה recurs across sixty-nine verses, almost always in the refrain וְיָדְעוּ כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה (ve-yadʿu ki ʾani YHWH), "and they will know that I am YHWH." What began as Egypt's lesson becomes every nation's. The formula reaches its widest horizon at Ezekiel 38:23, where YHWH says of the final assault of the nations, וְנוֹדַעְתִּי לְעֵינֵי גּוֹיִם רַבִּים וְיָדְעוּ כִּי־אֲנִי יְהוָה (ve-nodaʿti le-ʿene goyim rabbim ve-yadʿu ki-ʾani YHWH), "I will make myself known in the eyes of many nations, and they will know that I am YHWH." Pharaoh's defiant "I do not know YHWH" is the first note of a theme that runs to the end of the prophetic canon: God makes himself known, in the end, to all who said they did not know him.
The purpose is stated within the plague cycle itself and then carried into the New Testament. At the height of the plagues YHWH tells Pharaoh, "for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, and that my name may be declared in all the earth" (בְּכָל־הָאָרֶץ, be-khol ha-arets, Exodus 9:16) — and Paul quotes that verse exactly, of this Pharaoh, as Scripture's own account of God's dealing with him (Romans 9:17). The denial "I do not know YHWH" was always destined to become its opposite: Isaiah sees the day when "YHWH will make himself known to Egypt, and Egypt will know YHWH (וְיָדְעוּ מִצְרַיִם אֶת־יְהוָה)," the nation even serving him with sacrifice (Isaiah 19:21) — Pharaoh's refusal reversed at the national level. The wisdom tradition states the principle from the other side: those who fear YHWH "find the knowledge of God" (דַּעַת אֱלֹהִים, daʿat ʾelohim, Proverbs 2:5) — the very knowledge Pharaoh refused.
The same defiance was recognized as a type by the time of the Second Temple. The deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon, reading the Exodus, describes the Egyptians as those who "refused to know God" (ἠρνοῦντο εἰδέναι θεόν, Wisdom 12:27) and names "ignorance of God" (θεοῦ ἀγνωσία, Wisdom 13:1) as the root condition the plagues addressed — a Greek-speaking Jewish reading, centuries before the New Testament, that took Pharaoh's denial as willful refusal, not mere ignorance. These are historical witnesses to how the passage was heard, not Scripture on the level of the canon. The Septuagint's rendering of Pharaoh's words — οὐκ οἶδα τὸν κύριον, "I do not know the Lord" — then becomes the very phrase the New Testament uses for those outside the covenant: the Gentiles "who do not know God" (τὰ μὴ εἰδότα τὸν θεόν, 1 Thessalonians 4:5; τοῖς μὴ εἰδόσιν θεόν, 2 Thessalonians 1:8) carry forward, in the same verb (οἶδα) and the same negative, the formula first spoken in Pharaoh's court. The question Pharaoh asked in defiance — "Who is YHWH?" — is the question the whole canon answers, and the answer is given, finally, by the God who makes himself known. At the end of the canon, those who have conquered the beast sing "the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb": "all nations shall come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed" (Revelation 15:3-4). The name Pharaoh would not know is the name every nation will finally sing.