Did Abraham know God by the name LORD (YHWH), when Exodus 6 says he did not?

In Hebrew, to ‘know’ (yada‘) someone’s name often means to know by experience what the name stands for, not merely to have heard it. Exodus itself uses the word this way. Pharaoh had heard the name, yet he said, “I know not the Lord” (5:2). Then plague after plague comes so that he and the Egyptians “shall know that I am the Lord” (7:5, 17). In the same speech as 6:3, God tells Israel, who knew the name well, “ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (6:7).

So Exodus 6:3 does not say that the patriarchs had never heard the name YHWH. It says that God had shown himself to them chiefly ‘as’ (Hebrew be-) El Shaddai, God Almighty, the God able to keep his promises (Genesis 17:1). They received the promises, but they died without seeing them kept (Hebrews 11:13). Now, in bringing Israel out of Egypt and into the land, God would show what his covenant name meant: that he is the faithful God who does all he has promised (Exodus 6:4–8). Keil and Delitzsch read the verse this way, as did Poole and Gill before them.

On this reading Genesis 22:14 fits well. Abraham could call the place ‘the LORD will provide’ while the full meaning of that name was still to be shown in the exodus.

Read as a question

Some, including Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, read the last clause as a question: ‘by my name Jehovah was I not known to them?’ Hebrew can ask a question without a marker. Most translators do not take it so, but it would remove the difficulty.

The narrator’s use of the name

Some evangelical scholars hold that the patriarchs knew God chiefly by titles such as El Shaddai, and that Moses, writing Genesis after God had revealed his name, used the name LORD for the God they worshipped, as later readers knew him. On this view Genesis 22:14 gives the place name in the form Israel used later: “as it is said to this day”.

Christian scholars are divided over whether the patriarchs themselves used the name YHWH, or whether Genesis, written later, uses it for the God they worshipped. All agree that Exodus 6 marks a new and fuller revelation of what the name means.