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CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK
EXODUS
DR. DAVID ADAMS
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>> When I read in Chapter 34 Verse 7 that God will hold the
third and fourth generations guilty of the sins of the fathers,
I thought that God is being unjust. How could this God of love
hold children, grandchildren and great, great grandchildren
responsible for the sins of their ancestors?
>> Well, Nick, this really is a critical text in the Old
Testament. And it's closely related, of course, to the passage
in the Ten Commandments where the -- a similar phrase occurs
about God showing grace to thousands but not -- but visiting the
inequity of the fathers upon the children to the third and
fourth generation. I think the first thing that we need to do
is to clarify what is being said actually in this text when God
says this.
First -- and this is a matter of translation so you kind
of have to take my word for it. In Hebrew in these two passages
here in Chapter 34 and in Chapter 20, there is no word for
generation. The word in Hebrew is thirds and fourths, and
thirds means the third group or the third generation and fourths
means the fourth group or the fourth generation. And the same
is true -- and here is where most English translations fail us
because they don't treat this consistently.
The text also says thousands. And we must understand
that thousands in this context to mean a thousand generations.
A thousand groups just as thirds means third generations and
fourths means four generations. So thousands must be a thousand
generations.
Now, the reason I make this point and make it so
aggressively, if you will, is that the way we usually translate
this text leads us to misunderstand this text, to turn it
exactly upside down of what it's trying to say. Because to us,
we hear third and fourth generations as a lot. And a few
thousand as not as much. So it seems to us that in the -what's being said is that God will have mercy on a few thousand.
But that he will hold generations upon generations guilty for
the sins of the fathers. In other words, that God's judgement
outweighs his grace and his mercy.
And that's exactly the opposite of what the text is
trying to do. This text is trying to draw a contrast between
the meagerness of God's judgement that extends only to three or
four generations and the tremendous extent of God's grace which
extends to a thousand generations. And so in the -- this cosmic
scale of God's justice, you've got three or four generations
here and a thousand generations here. And so this text is
trying to emphasize the great extent of God's grace and mercy,
not his wrathfulness and his judgement.
And in classical theology, we have sort of a name for
this. When we say that the -- the judgement of God, the law, is
God's foreign work and the Gospel, God's graciousness, is God's
primary or rightful work. And so this contrast between the
foreign work of God and the genuine work of God that we make in
our systematic theology also comes in -- or is expressed in this
text here.
But almost everybody reads this the way that you read it,
Nick. Because frankly, sloppy translation of the Hebrew which
gives the exact opposite meaning of what's intended by the text.
And it's simply just a matter of inconsistency, of the
translator not translating the text in a consistent way here.
Unfortunately, this has become one of the texts where everybody
has heard it one way and, therefore, translaters hate to
translate it any other way. Because people are so used to
hearing it a certain way, that -- translaters are human, too.
And so they think they read it when, in fact, they are only just
repeating what they are used to hearing in the King James.
So the first thing we need to do within this -- we need
to deal within this text is to make sure we understand what the
emphasis is. The emphasis here is not on God's judgement. But
the emphasis -- he's using the generation thing as a way of
emphasizing the greatness of God's grace versus the meagerness
of his wrath. And that point is reenforced by what God says
directly when he defines the name Yahweh here.
So let's look at the definition of the name Yahweh. We
were talking about Chapter 34. We pointed out that there God
says he was going to define for Moses the meaning of the name
Yahweh. Now, this is at least the third time in the book of
Exodus in the text that we've looked at that we have had what we
might call divine self revelation passages.
We had that one in Chapter 3 where we had, you know, "I
will be who I will be." The emphasis was on preserving God's
illusiveness there. We had the one in Exodus 6 about the name
Yahweh. And the emphasis there was on connecting the name
Yahweh to the redemptive mission that God was in the midst of at
that point.
And now we come to the third of these revelatory passages
that we are going to look at here in this class. And this is in
some ways -- well, I was going to say it is the most important.
It balances the other two. And the other two were in the first
part of the book. So they were important, too.
The theological point about Yahweh as redeemer. This one
is in the second part of the book and it deals with a different
subject. Namely, Israel's relationship to Yahweh. So this is
the most important one in the second part of the book because
it's here in this text that Yahweh -- that Israel finally learns
who Yahweh is and what it means for them to be his people. So
let's read it.
Exodus Chapter 34 Verses 5 to 7. "Yahweh descended in a
cloud and stood with him there." And again, the English
translations usually say "proclaimed the name Yahweh." But I'm
going to translate it correctly. "Yahweh descended in a cloud
and stood before him and defined the name Yahweh. Yahweh passed
before him and Yahweh proclaimed" -- and here we have the
quotation following Yahweh is "a God of mercy and gracious, slow
to anger, abounding in grace and truth, extending grace to a
thousand generations, forgiving inequity and transgression and
sin. But who'll by no means clear the guilty visiting the
inequity of the fathers on the children and the children's
children to the third and fourth generation."
Now, the emphasis throughout this text is on God's grace.
And the note at the end about God inflicting judgement upon
three or four generations is just as a reminder as St. Paul says
in the New Testament "Shall we continue to sin so grace may
abound? By no means." That's not the point that God is trying
to make here. If forced to do so by our continued unrepentance
and rejection of Christ, God will judge those who are separated
from him. But it's not his desire to do so. That's why Christ
became man, to bring God's grace to the whole world.
So there are a couple of things that involve translation
here. Most English translations mistranslate Verse 6 and they
translate something like "Yahweh passed before him and said,
'Yahweh, Yahweh is a gracious God.'" I won't bore you with the
details of that. You'll just have to take my word for it that
it's a slight mistranslation. It doesn't really effect the
meaning here. But it is a sort of clumsy translation of the
text. The text should read "Yahweh passed before him and Yahweh
proclaimed," quote, "'Yahweh is a God gracious and merciful," et
cetera, et cetera.
So this text completes the answer to the question that we
posed at the beginning of this course: Who is Yahweh? It
completes the answer to the question: What does it mean for
Israel to be the people of Yahweh and for us to be the people of
Yahweh? And it shows Israel and it shows us that the
understanding of what it means to be the people of God can only
be comprehended in the light of the former question. In other
words, who is Yahweh. We can only understand what it means to
be the people of God by understanding who Yahweh is. So in this
text which defines Yahweh.
In fact, Martin Luther refers to this as a sermon on the
name Yahweh. And Luther has got it exactly right. This is
really the place in the book of Exodus where the name Yahweh is
defined in the technical sense. And it is defined in this way:
"Yahweh is a gracious and merciful God. Slow to anger,
abounding in kesid" -- that word we've talked about before -"and truth. Keeping kesid for a thousand generations" and so
forth.
This is who God is. God is the merciful and gracious
one. The one that is faithful in maintaining his grace. The
one who relates to his people in terms of kesid. In fact,
that's why this passage, Exodus 34 Verses 5 to 7, is the most
quoted confession of faith in the Old Testament. This section
is quoted eight times in the Old Testament. Not always
verbatim. But almost verbatim.
It's quoted in Psalm 86 Verse 15. It's quoted in Psalm
103 Verse 8. It's quoted in Psalm 145 Verse 8. It's quoted in
Numbers 14 Verse 18. It's quoted by the prophet Joel in Chapter
2 Verse 13. It's quoted by the prophet Nahum Chapter 1 Verse 3.
It's quoted by Nehemiah, Chapter 9 Verse 17. And it's quoted by
Jonah, Chapter 4 Verse 2. And all of those are direct or almost
direct quotations of this Verse.
As I said, it's the most quoted passage in the Old
Testament. It's also alluded to one way or another in passing
probably 100 other times in the Old Testament. This really is
the core of Israel's understanding about who Yahweh is and about
how they live in the presence of Yahweh. This is the basis of
all of Israel's later reflection upon Yahweh's identity and his
deeds and upon their and our relationship to him.
And so it's not surprising then that the Gospel of John
applies this passage to Jesus. And I want to make sure that we
call our attention to this. Because it's -- it's one of those
things that's very easy to miss because the difference between
reading Greek and reading Hebrew.
So here I'm going to translate a phrase of the Hebrew
very literally for you. It's not the way that most English
translations have it. Because most English translations try to
smooth it out a bit. But I'm going to translate it very
literally here.
From Exodus 34, the end of Verse 6, there we read "Yahweh
is a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger." And here is the
part I want to translate carefully. "Abounding in grace and
truth." Okay?
Now, the Gospel of John picks this up in John Chapter 1
Verse 14 when God says, "The Word became flesh and dwelled among
us. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son from
the Father full of grace and truth." And again three verses
later, Verse 17, John says, "The law was given through Moses.
Grace and truth came from Jesus Christ."
What John says here -- in fact, the language in Greek
***plaras karatos ki alathias, abounding in grace and truth,
reflects the Hebrew language abounding in kesid ***wa imeth.
The language isn't the same. Obviously I used different words.
But even the phraseology is similar here.
These are the -- this is the point I want to make for
you. Here in Exodus 34 and in John Chapter 1 in the two places
I quoted, these are the only places in the entire Bible where
this phrase "abounding in grace and truth" occur. And most of
the time we don't make the connection between them because of
the failure of translaters to -- you know, to translate the
Hebrew in Exodus 34 precisely enough. They tend to try to
smooth it out because it's a complex passage. But in this case,
the -- you know, God is in the details, if you will, here. And
the detail is a crucial one.
Because what John is saying is that the God who revealed
himself to Moses as full of grace and truth, as keeping kesid
with his people, is revealed to the whole in Jesus Christ. So
this passage, Exodus 34 Verse 5 to 7, is made by John. It's one
of the most important christological passages in the entire Old
Testament. Because he quotes this, this self definition of
Yahweh, and says, "If you want to see he who Yahweh is" -remember in the context Moses had asked to see God's glory and
God says, "I will show you my goodness." And if you want to see
God's goodness revealed to the world, John says we see that in
the one who became flesh to reveal God's kesid ***imeth, his
grace and truth to us.
By the way, this phrase "grace and truth" both in the Old
Testament and the New Testament are a little clumsy sounding.
What does that mean, grace and truth? The two words don't quite
seem to go together. This is a grammatical construction that in
Hebrew we call ***hinditis. Hinditis means using two words to
express a single idea. And so true grace is what is meant by
grace and truth. The phrase grace and truth means true grace.
So Yahweh is true grace. And the true grace of God is
revealed to all mankind through Jesus Christ. And that's why
this passage here in Exodus 34 Verse 5 to 7 is not only the
central confession of faith in the Old Testament, it's not only
the clearest expression in the Old Testament of who Yahweh is
and what it means for us to be the people of God, but also for
us the clearest, one of the most important christological
passages in the entire Old Testament.
***
This text is being provided in a rough draft format.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in
order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a
totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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