The Burning Bush
Moses had been forty years a fugitive when it happened. He had killed an Egyptian and fled into Midian, where he had married Zipporah the daughter of Jethro and pastured his father-in-law's flocks at the edge of the…
Biblical Narrative
Moses had been forty years a fugitive when it happened. He had killed an Egyptian and fled into Midian, where he had married Zipporah the daughter of Jethro and pastured his father-in-law's flocks at the edge of the desert. He led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and Moses looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
He turned aside to see — and out of the bush God called to him by name. He told him to put off his shoes, for the place was holy ground. He told him he had seen the affliction of his people in Egypt and heard their cry, and was come down to deliver them. He told him: I am sending you. Moses asked five times, in five different ways, to be excused. He was not eloquent. He was a stranger. The people would not listen. He was nobody.
And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, ehyeh asher ehyeh — I AM THAT I AM. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. The verb to be is the answer; tense is irrelevant; the past, the present, the future, all collapse into a single declarative statement of self-existence.
Then God gave Moses signs — the staff that became a serpent, the hand that became leprous and clean again — and his brother Aaron to be his mouthpiece, and sent him back to the Pharaoh he had fled from. Moses came down from the mountain a different man, and the history of Israel changed shape that hour. The bush is the hinge.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM... Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.Exodus 3:14
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The location of Mount Horeb (called Sinai in some sources) has been disputed since antiquity. The traditional identification with Jebel Musa (2,285 m) in the southern Sinai peninsula was established by Christian monastic communities in the third and fourth centuries CE, and is the site of St Catherine's Monastery, founded by Justinian I in 548-565 CE. The monastery's chapel of the burning bush encloses a Rubus sanctus shrub identified since at least the sixth century as the very plant from which God spoke; the species is endemic to a small range and is, in any case, a respectable candidate.
Modern critical scholarship has proposed several alternative locations. Jebel Sin Bishar (618 m) in the central Sinai, advocated by Israeli geographer Menashe Har-El, is closer to the traditional eastern delta departure-point. Jebel al-Lawz (2,580 m) in the Hejaz of northwest Saudi Arabia has been proposed since the 1980s on the basis of Galatians 4:25's location of Sinai 'in Arabia'; archaeological investigation of the site has been hampered by Saudi access restrictions. Har Karkom in the central Negev, excavated by Emmanuel Anati, shows extensive Late Bronze Age cultic activity but is far from any plausible Sinai departure-route.
The 'I AM THAT I AM' (ehyeh asher ehyeh) of Exodus 3:14 has been the subject of two and a half millennia of philological commentary. The Hebrew is grammatically simple — first-person imperfect of the verb hayah (to be) — but pragmatically dense. Septuagint Greek renders it ego eimi ho on, 'I am the existing one', a more philosophical formulation that influenced Christian and Hellenistic Jewish ontology. Rabbinic readings (Exodus Rabbah 3:6) emphasize the future-tense reading: 'I will be with you in this trouble as I will be with you in troubles to come'. Modern Semitists tend to read the imperfect as a form of evasive self-disclosure: 'I will be whatever I will be' — an answer that simultaneously gives a name and refuses one.
The phenomenon of an unconsumed-burning bush has been the subject of various naturalistic explanations, none of them especially convincing. Dictamnus albus (gas plant), which secretes volatile oils that can briefly ignite without harming the plant, is sometimes suggested but does not grow in the Sinai. A burning bush at evening with the sun behind it can produce a striking visual effect; St Elmo's fire on a thorn-bush at altitude is theoretically possible. The narrative is, however, deliberately marked as a theophany rather than a meteorological event, and the early commentators (Philo, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) read it allegorically, not naturalistically.
The burning bush is not described as a natural phenomenon misperceived but as a deliberate epiphany — a sign chosen because its impossibility forces interpretation rather than supplying explanation.Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion (1985)