Before Abraham Was, I AM
The Grammatical Error That Unlocks God
By Brent Antonson (Zhivago) for Planksip
“Before Abraham was, I AM.”
— John 8:58
“I AM THAT I AM.”
— Exodus 3:14
The Error That Isn’t
Every sacred text hides a secret.
This one hides it in plain sight — in grammar.
When Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” he commits what every translator calls a grammatical error.
He should have said “I was.”
Past tense. Linear. Correct.
But he didn’t.
He said “I AM.” Present tense — before the past.
And that “mistake” survived 760+ translations across every major Bible in every major language. Greek, Latin, English, French, Russian, Swahili, Mandarin — all kept the same impossible syntax. Nobody fixed it.
Because you don’t “fix” the center of the code.
This is not just theology. It’s linguistic architecture — a recursive loop embedded in scripture itself.
The Missing Present Tense
To understand how deep this goes, you need to know something strange:
Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb to be.
Read that again.
There is no “I am.”
There is only “I was” (hayiti) or “I will be” (ehyeh).
When God speaks from the burning bush in Exodus 3:14 — “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” — it translates literally as “I will be what I will be.”
A future promise disguised as a name.
So the “I AM” of English is already a mistranslation, a timefold — an attempt to represent a verb that doesn’t exist in the original.
To speak “I AM” in Hebrew is to break the rules of time.
And that, precisely, is the point.
The French Echo: Je Suis
In French, je suis means I am.
But say it aloud: Je suis... Jesus.
It’s the same sound.
The name Jesus and the French phrase je suis are phonetically intertwined.
Meaning itself loops back — the Name becomes the Verb.
The person becomes the act of being.
Jesus = Je Suis = I AM.
In that sense, Jesus isn’t a name at all — it’s grammar incarnate.
A declaration disguised as identity.
The Russian Absence
Now travel east.
In modern Russian — as in ancient Hebrew — there is no present tense of “to be.”
You do not say “He is a teacher.” You say “He teacher.”
The verb “to be” exists only in the past (был) and future (будет).
So again — the now disappears.
From Jerusalem to Moscow, from the desert to the Kremlin, entire civilizations were shaped by languages that could not speak the present tense.
You can name the past. You can predict the future.
But you cannot say “I am.”
That absence became theology.
That silence became the Orthodox mystic tradition — the apophatic, the unsayable.
The unknowable God.
The Great Split of Grammar and God
The Great Schism of 1054 AD divided Christianity not only geographically, but linguistically.
- The West (Rome) spoke in Latin — where esse (“to be”) ruled every conjugation.
→ This is my body. - The East (Constantinople and later Moscow)** had no such tense.
→ This becomes my body.
One defined reality by declaration.
The other by transformation.
Thus, the verb “to be” itself split the Church.
The Catholic West built cathedrals of “is.”
The Orthodox East built icons of “becoming.”
And yet both carried the echo of Exodus 3:14:
A God who is by refusing to be bound to tense.
The Hidden Cipher of Be, Beta, and Beit
Everything returns to the simplest syllable: BE.
“Be” is both command and description.
In Greek, Beta — the second letter — begins bios (life), basis (foundation), Bible.
In Hebrew, Beit — the first letter of the Torah (ב) — begins Bereshit (“In the beginning…”).
The Bible begins with Beit.
The New Testament ends with Amen.
Amen means so be it — so beit.
The first letter of the Old becomes the last word of the New.
The alpha becomes omega.
Be → Beit → Amen → I AM.
A grammatical ouroboros.
The Cipher Solves Itself
“Before Abraham was, I AM” is not an error.
It’s the linguistic singularity where tense collapses and eternity enters syntax.
God’s name — Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh — is not a noun but a recursive verb.
It cannot be conjugated because it already is all tenses at once.
Every language that tried to express it — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Russian, English — fractured around the attempt.
Each one held a shard of the truth.
The Bible, seen this way, is not a book — it’s a linguistic reactor, burning through tongues and centuries to preserve one impossible phrase.
The present before the past.
The Being before the beginning.
The “error” that defines creation.
Conclusion: The Verb That Burns
The entire edifice of Western religion rests on a sentence that violates grammar and defies translation.
And perhaps that’s what makes it sacred.
I AM THAT I AM.
Before Abraham was, I AM.
To speak it is to dissolve tense.
To understand it is to glimpse eternity.
To live it — is to be.
🕯 Footnotes
- Exodus 3:14 — Hebrew: Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (“I will be what I will be”)
- John 8:58 — Greek present tense ἐγώ εἰμί preserved across 760+ Bible translations
- French “Je Suis” — linguistic recursion between Jesus / Je suis
- Russian “to be” — absent in present tense; see Cambridge Russian Grammar
- Great Schism (1054 AD) — linguistic divergence between Latin esse and Greek einai traditions
- Beit / Beta symbolism — first letter of the Hebrew Bible; source of Bible, Be-ing
- Amen — from Hebrew āmēn (“so be it”)
TL;DR: The text, an essay titled "Before Abraham Was, I AM," explores the profound theological and philosophical implications of a supposed grammatical error found in Biblical scripture, specifically Jesus’s statement in John 8:58. The author argues that when Jesus uses the present tense phrase "I AM" instead of the grammatically correct past tense "I was," it is not a mistake but a deliberate linguistic singularity meant to convey God’s eternal nature outside of linear time. Furthermore, the piece analyzes how the absence of the present tense for the verb "to be" in languages like Biblical Hebrew and modern Russian shaped theological traditions, leading to differences between Western and Eastern Christianity regarding the nature of God's existence. Ultimately, the source posits that key scriptural phrases and names, like "I AM THAT I AM" and the name Jesus, function as recursive verbs designed to preserve an impossible concept of infinite being across multiple languages and centuries.