Farrell Till, the editor of The Skeptical Review and one of the country's leading errantists, has alleged that separate contradictions are to be found in Exodus, both dealing with the name Yahweh. I will rebut these allegations, beginning with the one below:

Exodus 3:13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them?

In a post to his internet list (errancy@infidels.org), Farrell Till has said that this statement shows that the writer believed that the Israelites didn't know the name Yahweh, and contradicts what Till believes is evidence that most of the Israelites must have known the name.

In rebuttal, I've asked where the Bible says or implies that most of the Israelites knew the name Yahweh. Till responded with a flurry of eight different posts in which he insisted he could provide such evidence, but wouldn't until I took him up on his $100 bet that he could do so; soon after that, he withdrew from the argument, saying he would shield himself from my posts to his list. However, one member of the list then responded by presenting the names of twenty-six persons from post-flood times up to Moses' conversation with God who knew the name Yahweh. By way of example, a few of these names, with the corresponding verses, were Rebekah, Isaac, and Esau (Genesis 27: 7); Jacob (Genesis 27:20); Leah (Genesis 29:32); Rachel (Genesis 30:24); Laban (Genesis 30:27); and Moses/Aaron (Exodus 3:15). A more complete list of characters who knew the name Yahweh, besides those just mentioned, would include Noah, Abraham, the king of Sodom, Sarah, Hagar, Lot, the men [angels] who went to Lot, Lot's son-in-laws [sic], Abraham's eldest servant, Bethuel, Laban's wife, Abimelech, Ahuzzath and Phichol, Leah, Pharaoh, and the officers of the people of Israel.

If this is the evidence Till had in mind, no wonder he went into hiding; all this shows is that only twenty- six persons knew the name Yahweh, but it may be inferred from the Bible itself that there were as many as three million Israelites at the time of Moses. Farrell Till made this estimate himself in The Skeptical Review.

“Exodus 12:37 states that when the Israelites left Egypt, the number of men on foot (not counting women and children) was 600 thousand! When a census was taken in the wilderness (Num. 1:46), it claimed the men of military age (20 years old and up) numbered 603,550! If we assume an equal number of women in this age group... this would mean the adult population older than 20 numbered around 1,200,000. Then with the children of both sexes under 20 added on, there would have been a total population of two and a half to three million! (“Holes in the Two-Amrams Theory,” Spring 1990, p. 2).

Thus, the best the Bible skeptics can do is show that twenty-six people knew the name, but what about the other 2,999,974 Israelites?

Some skeptics claim that one would have to believe in a conspiracy of silence to believe that any of the Israelites could not have known the name, but that argument is really too weak to be credible, and is quite easily rebutted: The farther from the principal sources the information flowed and the more it was repeated by less important persons, the less weight the news may have carried, the more it might have been distorted, and the less it might have been believed. Thus, after a while, the stories about Yahweh's name may have just died out. This is speculative, of course, but it is no less speculative than the skeptics' contention that there had to have been forces in play so strong that the three million all had to have known the name. What are these forces?

Why couldn't there have been hundreds of thousands of Israelites who didn't know the name, and those were the ones the Exodus writer thought Moses would have been worried about when he told Yahweh that they would ask, “What is his name”? Until Till answers this question, I don't think he will have convinced anyone that there's necessarily a contradiction. An attempt to rebut this is made by Matt Bell who seems to [be] supporting Till's belief that if this many major Bible characters knew the name, why shouldn't most of the three millions Israelites have known the name, too? However, the question still is unanswered: why couldn't a significant portion of the large number of persons to whom Moses would speak not know the name Yahweh?

And, besides, if we argue in the alternative, the question by Moses doesn't have to mean that the Exodus writer believes even one single Israelite is ignorant of the name “Yahweh.” The Exodus writer might be telling us that Moses doubted whether the Israelites with whom he would speak would believe him if he said that he spoke to the “god of their fathers,” since the penalty for seeing God is death (Ex. 3:20). Thus, the Exodus writer has Moses telling Yahweh that his people would ask for some sort of confirmation that the god Moses spoke to was really Yahweh, and not some other god which Moses thought was Yahweh. Thus, the Exodus writer has Moses saying that the children of Israel would ask him, “What is his name?” Then, since Moses wanted to be sure he had permission to say the sacred name Yahweh, he asks him, “What shall I say unto them? May I say ‘Yahweh,’ instead of ‘god of your fathers’?”

If skeptics cannot show that either of these alternative positions is so unreasonable that any inerrantist defending it should be laughed at, then they should not affirm there is a contradiction in the Yahweh-name matter.

Farrell Till also alleged that Exodus contradicts the fact that Yahweh told Abraham his name in Genesis:

Exodus 6:3 And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah [Yahweh] was I not known to them. Genesis 15:7 And he said unto him [Abraham], I am the LORD [Yahweh].

However, another member of the errancy list pointed out that evidence against this argument is found in Berry's Hebrew-English interlinear (A New Old Testament, Follett, 1959, p. 239), which translates this as “...but by my name Jehovah was I not known by them.” Bible defenders (Jerry Falwell, for example) maintain that a question is implied, and the “technical” possibility of this view was allowed by another errancy member who noted that surrounding context must be used to determine whether a statement is a question: “The question ‘Art thou my very son Esau’ (Gen. 27:24) is grammatically indistinguishable from the simple sentence, “Thou art my very son Esau...” [and that] only from the clues provided by the immediate context... can one conclude that the phrase was meant as a question and not a simple statement.”

Thus, one may reasonably believe that the context surrounding Exodus 6:3 would lead one to conclude that a question is implied, and not a statement, because there are many references to Abraham and others knowing the name “Yahweh” in Genesis.

Thus, Till's allegation of error is once again fairly easily rebutted, if not disproved; if any skeptic thinks that this rebuttal is based on a scenario so implausible that any Bible-lover who offered it should be laughed at, let him present his case. Otherwise, Till should remove this from his list of biblical contradictions.