The Divine name – Va’era
The sidra begins by saying that despite the Divine names which figure in the Torah hitherto, we now find the people perceiving the Almighty by the four-letter name which we render HaShem (Ex. 6:3).
Yet surely that name was already known from the previous chapters of Sh’mot and all the more so from the Book of B’reshit!
Maybe until now the names of God were just names, but now the people have existed long enough to realise the significance of each name – in particular that Elokim denotes Divine power and HaShem denotes Divine love.
