Did Abraham know God's name?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Genesis 22:14 reports that after the binding of Isaac "Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh" (יְהוָה יִרְאֶה, YHWH-yireh, "YHWH will see/provide"), placing the divine name YHWH in the patriarch's own mouth as a name he knows and uses. Exodus 6:2-3, however, has YHWH tell Moses: "I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty (אֵל שַׁדַּי, El Shaddai), but by my name JEHOVAH (YHWH) was I not known to them." The two verses make incompatible claims about whether the patriarchs knew the name YHWH.

The usage in Genesis is not isolated to 22:14. The patriarchal narratives have YHWH invoked by name repeatedly: Abram "called upon the name of the LORD" at Genesis 12:8 and 13:4; YHWH self-identifies to Abram, "I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur," at 15:7; Isaac builds an altar and "called upon the name of the LORD" at 26:25; and YHWH introduces himself to Jacob, "I am the LORD God of Abraham," at 28:13. James Kugel catalogues exactly this saturation of the patriarchal material with the name YHWH and sets it against Exodus 6:3's flat denial. Critical scholarship resolves the tension diachronically: the Yahwist (J) uses YHWH from Genesis 4:26 ("then began men to call upon the name of the LORD") onward, whereas the Priestly source (Exodus 6:2-3) and the Elohist (Exodus 3:13-15) both present the name as a revelation given first to Moses. Friedman treats the divine-name distribution as a primary criterion of source division, and Baden incorporates it into his restatement of the Documentary Hypothesis. On this account Genesis 22:14 (J) and Exodus 6:3 (P) preserve two theologies of when the name entered Israel's worship, joined by a redactor who did not harmonize them.

The principal apologetic response, advanced by Archer and Kaiser and developed at length in J. A. Motyer's monograph, distinguishes knowing the name from knowing its full significance: the patriarchs used the name YHWH but did not yet experience the covenant-keeping, redemptive character that the Exodus would reveal. On this reading nodaʿti ("I was made known") connotes experiential rather than nominal knowledge — "they did not know me as YHWH-the-deliverer." The reading has a long pedigree and is not frivolous; "to know the name" in Hebrew idiom can carry the sense of knowing the reality the name denotes (cf. the recurring "that they may know that I am the LORD").

The syntax of Exodus 6:3 nonetheless resists it. The verse is built on a deliberate contrast between two names: "I appeared by the name El Shaddai, but by my name YHWH I was not made known." The parallelism sets one designation that was the medium of patriarchal revelation against another that was not. If the point were merely a deeper experience of the same already-known name, the contrast of names would be pointless; the natural force of the antithesis is that one name was used with the fathers and the other was not. The companion P/E text at Exodus 3:13-15, where Moses must ask what name to give and God discloses it, reinforces that the name is being presented as new information at the Mosaic moment. The experiential-knowing defense thus loads a large theological distinction onto a verb whose contrastive syntax points the other way, and it must still explain why Genesis repeatedly has the patriarchs pronouncing the very name Exodus 6:3 says was withheld from them.

Where the critical reading lands: a clean contradiction at the level of the final text, best explained by the convergence of two pentateuchal sources with different theologies of the name.