Question

Hello Rabbi,
In the portion of Exodus, Moses asks for the name of the Holy One, blessed be He:

And Moses said to God, “Behold, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I Will Be What I Will Be.” And He said, “Thus shall you say to the children of Israel: ‘I Will Be has sent me to you.’” And God said further to Moses, “Thus shall you say to the children of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and this is My remembrance from generation to generation.”

At first glance the question is puzzling, because why should it matter what the Holy One’s name is if He is the one and only God who created the world (as you often say, “For all I care, call Him Yankele”). And the Holy One’s answer is also puzzling, because I would have expected Him to answer Moses that he should tell the children of Israel that the one and only God who created the world is the One who sent me to you. In fact, I saw that in the Keter Yonatan translation, the expression “I Will Be What I Will Be” is translated as: “He who spoke and the world came into being spoke and everything came into being” (that is, he too sensed the difficulty here). But if you read the text from within a polytheistic outlook, both the question and the answer become logical again. In a polytheistic world, it matters a great deal which god sent Moses, and the identifier of that god is his name.
It is possible that in Moses’ time the issue of monotheism was not yet known (at least according to one of the J, E, P sources), and that it developed only later among the people of Israel. This also connects to another question I asked you regarding the verse: “When the Most High gave nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel/God.” And regarding what you wrote to me there: “If the Holy One revealed Himself to Abraham, then I assume he knew who was speaking to him,” I think there is no necessity that if the Holy One reveals Himself to someone, He would also update him on matters of correct theological outlook. Especially since such an update might not have been accepted by the children of Israel, and perhaps not even by Moses and Abraham, since the story is well known of Akhenaten, the Egyptian pharaoh, who tried to uproot the polytheistic outlook from Egypt and move them to the worship of a single god (for example, he made sure to erase the letters corresponding to the plural ending wherever the word “gods” appeared in various temples), and he did not succeed. Not only that, the Egyptians tried to erase his memory from Egyptian history because of this attempt (which in the end they also did not succeed in doing).
I’d be glad to hear your opinion on this matter.
Best regards,