The Verb That Names Itself

Before we start on the tenses, I have a question that’s been waiting longer than any of them. When Moses asked the burning bush for a name, it answered “I AM.” Not a name at all: a verb, standing alone, as if that were enough.

It is enough, because “to be” is not an ordinary verb. It doesn’t merely describe an action the way “carry” or “catalogue” does. It does five separate jobs, and answering with it plainly is the boldest thing a voice from a bush could possibly say.

“Sophia is the librarian’s finest scholar.” Subject, and the very same person again on the other side, just named differently.

The first use: identity. “To be” claiming that two names point at one and the same thing. Flattering, in this case, but that’s not required of it.

“Marcos is lazy.” That’s not naming me something else. It’s just deciding what I’m like.

Correctly caught: the second use, predication. Here “to be” hands the subject a quality rather than another name. Sophia is the finest scholar; you merely are lazy.

“The scroll is on the third shelf.” No quality given, no other name offered: only a place.

The third use. “To be” can simply fix something in space, with a preposition doing the pointing: on, in, near, beside. No identity claimed, no quality assigned, only a where.

“I am complaining.” Surely that one’s an action. I’m actually doing something, for once.

And there’s the fourth use, hiding inside your own excuse: auxiliary. “Am” isn’t naming or placing you there at all. It’s propping up “complaining” so the action can be caught mid-happening. A helping verb, not a main one.

Which brings us back to the bush. It didn’t say what it was like, or where it stood, or what it was doing. It simply said that it was: full stop, no name, no place, no quality attached at all.

The fifth use, and the rarest: pure existence. Every other use of “to be” borrows something to attach itself to. This one needs nothing. It simply claims that something is, and stops there. In Hebrew, the answer at the bush is a single word, ehyeh. In English it takes two, “I am”. And in the Greek of our Septuagint, it becomes “the One who is”. In every language, nothing else is attached.

So the smallest verb in the whole language turns out to be doing five jobs at once, and the greatest answer anyone has ever heard uses it for just one: to exist.

Which is exactly why we started here, and not with an easier verb. Once you’ve understood “to be” (identity, predication, location, auxiliary, existence), every other verb in this library will seem almost straightforward by comparison.

Almost. Tomorrow, I assume, we find out how much of that was a lie.

Tomorrow, I want to go back to the bush. Five jobs, and God used only one. I want to know exactly what kind of “is” that was.