"And Moses said before the Lord, Behold, I will go to the sons of Israel, and say to them, The Lord God of your fathers hath sent me to you: and they will say to me, What is His Name? What shall I say to them?"
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (3:13) captures the anxious precision of Moses's question. He is not asking a theological abstraction. He is asking a tactical one. The people will ask for a name. Give me something to say.
Why would the Israelites ask for a name? The sages explained: in Mizraim, every god had a name. Isis. Osiris. Ra. Thoth. A god without a name was no god at all. If Moses arrived in the slave quarters and said "I have been sent by the God of your fathers" — the Israelites, four hundred years removed from Jacob's deathbed, would ask: which God? What is He called? How do we address Him?
Moses is anticipating this. He is a new prophet, and he is asking his Sender for the proper business card.
The Targum's Aramaic preserves the piercing directness of the request: What shall I say? Moses is not yet the confident figure of later Torah. He is a shepherd who grew up in a palace and now has to walk into a labor camp. He wants specifics.
This is one of the most human moments in the whole Sinai episode. The prophet, receiving the mission of his life, is worried about what to say in the opening sentence. God will answer him in the next verse with one of the most enigmatic names in Scripture.
Beloved, the bravest prophets are often the ones most unsure of their opening lines. Courage is not the absence of that question. Courage is asking it anyway.