Exodus 3:13 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Shall say to me, What is his name? &c.— Bishop Warburton judiciously observes, that "at this time, so great was the degeneracy of the Israelites in Egypt, and so sensible was Moses of its effects, in ignorance of, or alienation from, the true God, that he would willingly have declined the office; and, when absolutely commanded to undertake it, he desired that God would let him know, by what NAME he would be called, when the people should ask the name of the God of their fathers. In which we see a people, not only lost to all knowledge of the UNITY, (for the asking for a name necessarily implied their opinion of a plurality,) but likewise possessed with the very spirit of Egyptian idolatry. The religion of NAMES was a matter of great consequence in Egypt: it was one of their essential superstitions: it was one of their native inventions; and the first of them which they communicated to the Greeks. A NAME was so peculiar an adjunct to a local, tutelary deity, that we see, by a passage quoted by Lactantius, from the spurious books of Trismegist, (which, however, abounded with Egyptian notions and superstitions,) that the one Supreme God had no name, or title of distinction. Zechariah, evidently alluding to these notions, when he prophesies of the worship of the Supreme God, unmixed with idolatry, says, in that day shall there be one Lord, and HIS NAME ONE, Zechariah 14:9. Out of indulgence, therefore, to this weakness, God was pleased to give himself a NAME. 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: where we may observe, according to the constant method of Divine Wisdom, when it condescends to the prejudices of men, how, in the very instance of indulgence to their superstition, he gives a corrective of it. The religion of names arose from an idolatrous polytheism; and the name here given, which implies eternity and self-existence, directly opposeth that superstition."