I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself fully known to them. God is drawing a distinction between the experiential depth of revelation available to the patriarchs and what He is now about to disclose. El Shaddai — God Almighty — was the name under which the patriarchs knew God's power; YHWH — the Lord — is the covenant name tied to the character being demonstrated through the Exodus. John 17:6 records Jesus saying: I have revealed your name to those you gave me out of the world. The progressive disclosure of God's name across the biblical narrative is not a correction of earlier revelation but its deepening. What Abraham knew was true; what Moses and Israel are about to experience is the same truth made experientially tangible through the most dramatic sequence of divine acts in the Old Testament.

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