Who am I? Moses' second question to God at the burning bush was, Who are you?

So I'll go to the Israelites and say, your father's God sent me to you, and they'll immediately ask me what his name is.

What shall I say to them? God's reply, a yeah, I share a yeah, wrongly translated in almost every Christian Bible,

as something like, I am that I Am, deserves an essay in its

own right, and in fact I wrote about it in my book's Future Tense and the Great Partnership.

But his first question was me on Oakie. Who am I? Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh,

said Moses to God, and how can I possibly get the Israelites out of Egypt?

Now, on the surface, his meaning is clear. Moses is asking two things. The first is, who am I to be worthy of so great a mission?

And the second is, how can I possibly succeed? And God answers the second, because I will be with you.

You'll succeed because I'm not asking you. You'll succeed because I'm not

asking you to do it alone. I'm not really asking you to do it at all. I'll be doing it for you.

I want you to be there as my representative, my mouthpiece, my emissory and my voice. But God never

answered the first question. Perhaps in a strange way, Moses answered himself.

In Tanakh as a whole, the people who turn out to me the most worthy are the ones who deny

they are worthy at all.

The prophet Isaiah, when charged with his mission, said, I'm a man of unclean lips.

Jeremiah said, I can't speak for I am a child.

David, Israel's greatest king, echoed

Moses's words, who am I? Jonah, sent on a mission by God, tried to run away. According to

Rushbaum, Jacob was about to run away when he found his way blocked by the man or angel with whom

he wrestled at night. The heroes of the Bible aren't figures from Greek

myth or any other kind. They're not people possessed of a sense of destiny, determined from an early

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