'I Will Be With You': Where God's Name Begins (Genesis 26:1–11)

Two small Hebrew words in Genesis 26:3 carry the name God would later give Moses at the bush.

What does 'I will be with you' mean in Hebrew?

"I will be with you" (Genesis 26:3) is two words in Hebrew, ehyeh immekha, and the first of them is the word God later took as His name. Ehyeh is the first-person form of hayah (H1961), to be, and im (H5973) means with. Genesis 26:3 is the first time Scripture records God saying it to anyone.

Follow the phrase out of Gerar. God repeats it to Jacob: "Go back to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you" (Genesis 31:3). Then Moses stands barefoot at the bush, asks who he is to go to Pharaoh, and hears the same two words: "I will surely be with you" (Exodus 3:12). Two verses later Moses asks God's name, and the answer is the same verb again: "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you'" (Exodus 3:14). I AM is Ehyeh.

An English Bible gives you I will be in Genesis and I AM in Exodus, and nothing on the page connects them. A Hebrew reader heard one word. The promise God made Isaac in a famine was built from the verb God would choose for His own name. When He promised to be with Isaac, He was giving Isaac Himself. Isaiah built a name for the coming Son from the same word with: "will call Him Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:14), Immanuel (H6005), with us, God.

Why was Egypt the obvious place to go in a famine?

Egypt was the obvious place because its harvest came from the Nile, while Canaan's came only from the sky. Moses later put the difference to Israel plainly: Egypt was where "you sowed your seed and irrigated on foot, like a vegetable garden" (Deuteronomy 11:10), and Canaan was "a land of mountains and valleys that drinks in the rain from heaven" (Deuteronomy 11:11). When the rain failed in the hills, the Nile still rose.

Herders from the north went south to survive, and Egypt kept records of letting them in. A frontier official's letter from the thirteenth century BC, preserved in Papyrus Anastasi VI, reports letting shepherd tribes from Edom through a border fortress to the pools of the eastern Delta, to keep them and their herds alive. The road Isaac stood on was a well-worn famine route.

So God's command cut against every sensible plan. He told Isaac, "Stay in this land as a foreigner" (Genesis 26:3). The verb is gur (H1481), to live as a resident alien, the root of ger (H1616), the outsider with no land of his own. Isaac was told to stay hungry in the land God had promised, holding a title deed made of nothing but God's voice. Hebrews remembers Abraham's tents and names the son with him: "He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise" (Hebrews 11:9).

Why does Genesis 26:5 describe Abraham with the words of the law?

Genesis 26:5 uses the law's words so that Israel would hear their father Abraham keeping, from a listening heart, the very covenant they had received at Sinai. God says Abraham "listened to My voice and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws" (Genesis 26:5). Those are four technical terms of Israel's covenant: mishmereth (H4931), mitsvah (H4687), chuqqah (H2708) and torah (H8451).

The first readers of Genesis were that covenant people, and they knew this list by heart. Moses had given it to them on the edge of the land: "You shall therefore love the LORD your God and always keep His charge, His statutes, His ordinances, and His commandments" (Deuteronomy 11:1). Hearing Genesis read, Israel met their own covenant vocabulary on the lips of God about a man who lived centuries before Sinai.

The list opens with the root of it all: Abraham "listened to My voice" (Genesis 26:5), shama (H8085) with qol (H6963). Centuries before any tablets of stone, Abraham kept a voice he had learned to hear and trust. Israel heard that keeping God's law begins as listening to the God who speaks. They heard their own command in Isaac's as well. Their law carried God's word about Egypt, "You are never to go back that way again" (Deuteronomy 17:16), and here was their father Isaac, hungry at the border, told by the same voice to stay.

What does the word caressing mean in Genesis 26:8?

The word caressing translates tsachaq (H6711), to laugh or to play, and it is the root of Isaac's own name, Yitschaq (H3327), he laughs. When Abimelech looked from his window, the Hebrew says he saw Yitschaq metsacheq: Isaac isaac-ing with Rebekah.

The whole name is a story of God keeping His word. Sarah laughed at the promise behind the tent flap, then held the son who arrived on time and said, "God has made me laugh, and everyone who hears of this will laugh with me" (Genesis 21:6). The boy named for the laughter of a promise kept now hides his wife out of fear, and the truth comes out in the verb of his own name.

Hold the name inside the promise

Knowing God means knowing who is speaking when He says "I will be with you" (Genesis 26:3). Isaac heard the words and still feared the men of Gerar, as if the promise came from someone smaller than the One who would call Himself I AM. The same God says it now to every believer, and Hebrews gives us His sentence, "Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5), and then our answer: "So we say with confidence: 'The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?'" (Hebrews 13:6).

When God speaks His presence over you, through Scripture or through an encouragement someone shared with you, keep it in the Doxa app with the day you heard it. On the day the strangers ask their questions, read it back and remember whose name is inside it. He is I AM, and He is with His people to the end of the age.

This goes with today's Doxa Daily Lift: Why Did Isaac Call Rebekah His Sister? (Genesis 26:1–11)