"I Am Who I Am"

The story of how God communicated to Moses through a burning bush is known to even plenty of young children, a portion of the book of Exodus about how Moses encounters the miracle of a bush that burns without being consumed.  Telling Moses of how he will free the Israelites from oppression, God says he will use Moses as an instrument to bring about this liberation.  Wondering what he will say if he was to be asked for the name of the deity who would rescue the Israelites from Egyptian captivity, Moses asks for a name.  "I AM WHO I AM," God replies in Exodus 3:14.  God offers a phrase alluding to his higher metaphysical status in place of a standard name.  This brief part of the story is rather relevant to core truths about language and its relationship with the things words refer to.

Though there are many specific names for God across the Bible, the word God itself is just that, a word, a title meant to describe a certain kind of metaphysical being.  The diverse names and descriptions given to or by God in the various books of the Bible are only linguistic constructs that, like all words, refer to something more fundamental and transcendent than words all at once, for a logical truth or some other metaphysical existent must either already exist or already be understood as a concept in order for words to be created and matched with ideas (and I do not mean mere thoughts as they occur within minds, but the ideas and truths themselves that do not depend on human perception).  God, as the uncaused cause that created the physical world whether or not it is the deity spoken of in the Bible [1], would neither need nor inherently have a name, only characteristics that human words can later be used to communicate.

Names are contrived by conscious beings, whether by God or by humans.  The things names are assigned to can exist independent of or prior to the words that are paired with them.  Words are secondary, a means to the end of communicating truths and concepts that do not depend on words for their nature.  These are much more abstract, foundational truths about language than might be conventionally associated with the story of the burning bush, but they are true by necessity, and it is clear in the text of Exodus 3 that God is focusing on realities behind and beyond mere words.  Even when he elaborates after identifying as "I AM," he only calls himself the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob (3:15), abstaining from providing a singular name like Yahweh or Jehovah (not that there is anything blasphemous or otherwise erroneous about these names, contrary to what some idiots suggest).

There is no being besides a true deity that could exist uncaused and without metaphysical dependence of any kind on some other being, though even the uncaused cause only exists because of logical possibility and necessity, making it the ultimate being, the being without which there could be no material world, consciousness, or moral obligations, yet not the ultimate metaphysical existent.  Even so, the Bible presents the supreme being as not even needing to bother with names because its nature is not a construct like words.  As such, without describing it in this exact manner, Exodus addresses how reality is more significant than the words that so many people rely on for epistemological prompting--or fail to look past to ideas.  Whether one calls the Christian deity by the title God or by names such as Yahweh is nowhere near as important as the fact that there is an uncaused cause and that human existence is to God's existence as words are to truths: secondary at best.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html