Happy Rebirthday To Me!!

I like celebrating rebirthdays (anniversaries of baptisms, the day we're reborn of course).
To celebrate my rebirthday I'm going to share with the blogging community one of my favorite Old Testament factoids.

In Exodus 3, Jehovah is talking to Moses while calling him as his prophet. Moses wanted reassurance as well as a way to let Israel know that he was God's prophet. Here are verses 13-14:

13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? ^awhat shall I say unto them?

14 And God said unto Moses, ^aI AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

I was always confused about the I AM, how that would be an obvious indicator to the people of Israel and why it was such a comfort to Moses--to say nothing of why it would put Pharaoh back on his heels. (11 And Moses said unto God, ^aWho am I, that I should go unto ^bPharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?)
I learned something interesting about Hebrew a few years back, there's this cool verb conjugation thingie called the causative. Essentially what this means is that when you conjugate the verb in the causative, the verb makes something happen, so when God says that he is I AM, it's in the causative. In other words, if we were to translate I AM with its full grammatical meaning it would say in our scriptures, Because I exist, all things exist.
That's pretty powerful and that's why it was such a comfort to Moses, a signifier to the Israelites that Moses was called of God, and would be something that would set Pharaoh, the most militaristically powerful man on the earth, back on his heels thinking, "What's this Moses got that I don't have?"

Pretty cool, eh? Oh, man, do I ever love grammar!