Each divine name mentioned hitherto represented a quality or an attribute; we now come to one of comparatively more recent date, which contains neither attribute nor similitude; it is mentioned for the first time in a conversation between God and Moses. God speaks from the burning bush, and tells Moses to bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. “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? And God said unto Moses: ‘I Am that I Am.’ And he said: ‘Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you’” (Exod. iii. 14, 15). God in speaking of Himself said: “I Am that I Am,” or, “I Am”; but man in designating God used the word Jehovah. The etymology of this word was sought, and it was regarded by many, rightly or wrongly, as a derivative of the verb to be. Jehovah was thus--absolute existence, or the Being. “And God spake unto Moses and said unto him: ‘I am Jehovah; and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Jehovah I was not known to them’” (Exodus vi. 2, 3). Writers are now generally agreed that Jehovah should be pronounced Jahveh. Renan notices this striking fact. “The name of God which has conquered the world,” he says, “is unknown to all who are not Hebraists, and even they do not know how to pronounce it.” By a superstition which some writers trace back to a very remote period, the Israelites considered the name which God had used of Himself to be too sacred to be uttered by human lips; gradually its use was discontinued; and the name Lord was used in its place. Although the names of God all indicated the one true God, they did not preserve the children of Israel from polytheism, since there was hardly a tribe that did not forget the original meaning of the titles used. If the Jews had remembered the meaning of the word El, they could not have worshipped Baal as distinct from El; but in the same way as the Greeks connected the worship of Apollos and Uranus with that of Zeus, so the Jews were ready at times to invoke the gods of their neighbours. It is not that the earlier names of the Deity contained no second meaning as qualificative adjective; Force, for instance, could be symbolised, but the idea of absolute existence expressed by the words, “I Am,” excluded all symbol and all likenesses. The Jews did not profit by this preservative from error; on the contrary, with the advent in Israel of this new conception of the Deity, the partial eclipse which so often obscured their reason seems at times to have given place to one more complete. As soon as Moses had constituted them a nation, they appear to have looked upon God as a national God, ignoring His relationship with other peoples.