God, Being, and the ‘End of Metaphysics’: Paul Ricœur’s Hermeneutic Retrieval of Exodus 3:14

This paper responds to the phenomenological critique of ontotheology enacted by Heidegger and developed by Levinas and Marion. It asks the question: is it possible, as these thinkers would claim, to speak of God without any recourse to the language of being? The paper defends Paul Ricœur’s stance on the matter, namely, that even though the Heideggerian break between God and Being is definitive, nevertheless it is impossible to fully escape the language of Being when speaking of God. And yet in the face of the Heideggerian critique, Being must be understood in new ways. The conjunction of God and Being was an event in history enacted by the Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:14 from Hebrew into Greek, thereby yoking together Hebrew revelation with Hellenic metaphysics. Mindful of the Heideggerian and Levinasian critique, one must take care not to limit the divine name by applying an abstracting Greek metaphysics onto it, but on the contrary let the divine self-revelation in the Hebrew text add further layers to the already rich semantic field of meaning contained in the Greek notion of being. Thus, the death of the metaphysical God through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, and Marion has in fact opened up the space for a hermeneutic retrieval of the Hebraic 'hyh' that will continue to add new meaning to the polysemy of being for as long as Exodus 3:14 is still read.