Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 3rd March 2024), session three in our series journeying through the book of Exodus.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar… Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”’[i]
READ: EXODUS 3:1—4:28 (NIV)
CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER!
When Alice finds herself in Wonderland, she not only finds herself in a strange place, where nothing makes sense, but she also finds herself struggling with her own identity.
Lewis Carroll’s, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is a famous and timeless story about growing up. Alice, a young girl, is worried about entering into this strange world of adults, with all their confusing adult thinking and ways. At the same time, Alice knows she can’t stay a child forever. She’s already changing; she’s not the child she used to be, but she’s still not a grown-up.
She’s a little person in a world of big, intimidating people, while also being a big person in a world of little people. It’s a weird time.
I’m certain that the ‘grown-ups’ in the room can remember how daunting growing up was: That change between primary and secondary school? The change between education and work?
I’m nearly forty-four years old, and like Alice, I continue to find it scary, and I still feel torn between the adult world and the world I have left behind. It’s true what they say, ‘When you’re a child, you can’t wait to grow up. When you’re an adult, you wish you could be a kid again.’
Wonderland, as imagined by Alice, reflects the strangeness, the confusion and uncertainty that comes with growing up.
Alice ends up in Wonderland, because her burning curiosity leads her down a rabbit hole and into some bizarre encounters with unexpected characters. One of which, is with a hookah-smoking Caterpillar, sitting on a mushroom, who asks Alice the central question of her journey, ‘who are you?’
(As an aside: I adore the Disney animated classic version of this scene, with the Caterpillar blowing smoke letters.)
Alice isn’t sure. She knows who she was when she woke up that morning. But now she suspects she has changed several times since then.
Exodus 3 and 4 presents one of the most famous scenes in the whole of the Bible. A scene that, in some ways, is similar to Alice meeting the Caterpillar.
Moses’ curiosity has led him to a bush engulfed in flames—a bush that is on fire, but that is not consumed. Moses must have been looking at this bush for some time to notice this and have his curiosity aroused.
We’re not told that he was intentionally seeking some divine encounter. Moses was just going about his everyday job when this happens; tending sheep, in the backside of the desert, near the Mountain of Horeb/Sinai.[ii] Yet, his curiosity leads to this extraordinary conversation with God, and this calling to return to Egypt and speak with Pharaoh.
Yes, based on this story, there is an awful lot to be said about living with your eyes open, and the spiritual discipline of curiosity.[iii] However, central to this strange and wonderful scene is another major theme; that of identity.
Two questions drive this entire conversation; two questions that come from Moses’ mouth.
The first question, in a sense, is similar to Alice’s struggle in knowing who she is; Moses’ asks, ‘Who Am I?’ (Ex. 3:11).
The second question (to get to the core of verse 13), Moses aims at God, like the Caterpillar aims it at Alice, ‘Who are you?’ (Ex. 3:13)
‘Who am I?’
‘Who are you?’
WHO AM I?
On the surface, Moses’ first question, can seem to just be about worthiness; Moses does not feel he is enough, as a person, to be in the presence of the most powerful human on the planet at the time and speak.
That sense of worthiness is certainly here, and with a flavour of humour, too. Moses does not feel worthy enough to speak before Pharaoh, and yet, here is Moses, before The Creator of Heaven and Earth, and he is rather comfortable in speaking his mind very bluntly.
Take a note of this. We’ll come back to it later.
But underneath this sense of unworthiness is the deeper question of worth.
‘Who am I?’
In the latter verses of chapter 2 (that Helen touched on last week), Moses names his son, Gershom, because he has felt like and still feels like a stranger in a foreign land (Ex. 2:22).
The beginning of Gershom comes from the root word gar that forms the name Hagar—a famous character from the book of Genesis that is echoed in the Exodus story.[iv] This root word means more than merely being a stranger (because there are means to overcoming being a stranger). Gar carries a deeper sense, as seen in Hagar’s own story, of being alienated, forsaken, driven out. It speaks of being a permanent outsider.
‘Who am I?’
We know, as the readers of this story, that Moses is an Israelite. Moses, himself, understands something of this when he intervenes in a fight in chapter two. But does Moses feel he can identify as an Israelite?
He was adopted at three (five, at the very latest) and raised as an Egyptian: educated in their customs, clothing, mannerisms, and most likely, in their history and ancestry. He knows how to be an Egyptian. He spent thirty-seven years absorbing an Egyptian identity. He’s so Egyptian, in fact, that when Jethro’s daughters, back in Exodus 2:19, explained to their dad how they had watered the flocks so quickly, they reported, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds.”
Moses is soaked in this Egyptian identity, and it flows out of his pores. Like Blackpool rock, if you cut Moses down the middle, he would say Egyptian.
This no bad thing, per se. As I said in the first week, Exodus is not an anti-Egyptian story. Moses had an amazing Egyptian mother, who loved him as her own and instilled some powerful values in him. I am certain there is much that Moses loved about the richness of the Egyptian identity.
Ultimately, though, somehow and somewhere in his journey, and we’re not told how or where, Moses discovers he’s not an Egyptian and that his people are, in fact, the Hebrew slaves. When Exodus 2:11 informs us that Moses had ‘grown up’, its speaking of something more than age—there’s an awareness that has developed, an awareness that leads him to seek out his own people.[v]
We know how this worked out … not well at all.
When we meet Moses at the start of Exodus 3, he has been in Midian for the past forty years —learning their culture and their ways.[vi]
In total, for seventy-seven years he has been an Israelite who is not an Israelite, so to speak.
‘Who am I?’
We sense, when we read between the lines of these opening stories, that Moses must have had some contact with fellow Israelites, but we are not told about how much contact, or the quality of that contact.
He has an older brother, for example, called Aaron, that we are introduced to at the end of this segment (Ex. 4:14, 27-31). Moses does not show any surprise at this, appearing to know that he has a brother. But what’s that relationship like? Did they spend time talking together, playing the ‘shoulder-punch’ game, stealing each other’s clothes (in modern terms of brotherhood)? Unlikely.
Did he spend any time with his sister Miriam? Has he been sending “postcards” from Midian. Probably not.
His Hebrew parents, whose names we have yet to be told, are long dead when we meet Moses in this scene. How much time did he have with them? We know he was weaned until three, by his natural mother; but how much do you remember from being three years old?
When we read, in Exodus 2:11, that ‘One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens…’ (ESV), there’s this enormous sense that Moses, prior to this, has had hardly any contact with his own people, at all.
So I have to ask: What does Moses know of being an Israelite?
In way, he’s never been an Israelite. He’s never shared their experience—not when he lived in Egypt, and now, in Midian, he’s separated from their experience by miles upon miles, and years upon years. Who knows, he may even feel a sense of survivor’s guilt? He’s never suffered like they have, he’s just looked upon it: twice, and only twice, if I am to go off Exodus 2:11 & 13.
He had tried to intervene and help, and was then rejected by his own people, the people he wanted to know. In turn, he was rejected by Egypt, the only culture he had really ever known. And now, in exile, he is married into a Midianite culture, and has had to relearn a wholly different way of life.
Is he a prince, an outlaw, an exile, a shepherd?
‘Who am I?’
Again, what does Moses know of being an Israelite? Does he know his heritage, his ancestry, in the way that he would know Egyptian heritage? At this point in the story, does he know any of the stories we read about in Genesis? Does he even know of Israel’s God?
In Exodus 3:5, God tells Moses that he is the God if his ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But notice, in verse 13, that Moses is reticent to own this lineage. He replies to God, saying, ‘If I go the people of Israel and tell them the God of your ancestors…’, not, ‘the God of our ancestors.’
He’s not just in a wilderness, physically, when we meet him in this story, but also internally. Moses is not sure who he is or where he belongs.
Have you ever felt like this?
‘Who am I?’
Moses knows his name! That’s always a good start.
God says it twice to him, ‘Moses! Moses!’, and he replies, ‘Here I am!’[vii]
But even his name begs the question of, ‘Who am I?’
The name Moses does indeed sound like the Hebrew word Moshe, which means to ‘draw out’, and so his name is significant to the overall story—a foreshadow of what is to come.
However, Moses is an Egyptian name, given to him by his Egyptian mother. And, in many respects, it’s half a name, usually appearing at the back end of a fuller name.
Moses means ‘born of…’, ‘child of…’, and sometimes looks like moses, or sometimes meses.
If you know only a small bit about Egypt’s history, you have seen this name. For example, you have likely heard of Rameses?
The Egyptian name Ra-meses, means ‘born of [the god] Ra]’ (the god of the Sun). Ahmoses means, ‘born of [the god] Ah’ (god of the moon). Thutmose means ‘born of [the god] Thoth’, etc.
You get the picture. We have a similar thing today, with surnames like Jackson, Johnson, Richardson. If you have such surnames, then somewhere, back in your family history, there is a Jack, John, or a Richard you have descended from.
Some Egyptian rulers, in all their bravado, would stick a god’s name at the front, a way of claiming divine lineage.[viii] But, even those who were not royalty used the name-ending moses to talk about where they came from, who they were.
But as for this Moses, well, he’s just ‘son of (blank)’.
Can you sense the ‘lost-ness’ of Moses? Maybe it’s a sense we have also experienced, at one time or another?
So much of modern-day talk, in society and even in church, seems to be so possessed with the self-obsessed journey of self, and discovering self. We often miss the deeper reality, the deeper longing, though, which is that we all long to belong somewhere, to something, to someone.
Moses doesn’t know who he is, or whose he is.
‘Who am I?’
I want us to capture Moses at this moment for two reasons:
Firstly, in the story that follows, it’s important to remember that Moses himself is on a huge learning curve. He is not described as the perfect man, perfect leader or even a hero, as such. He is on a journey of encountering God. And he struggles with God through this encounter, and God struggles with him, just like his ancestor Jacob did, and just like we all do.
He will also struggle with the people, too, and they will struggle with him. He’s learning on the job. Occasionally, he gets it right. Occasionally, he blows it big time, as we’ll come to see. But ultimately, he is forever a student. He’s been in a training ground, he will continue being in a training ground, because the reality is that we never cease from growing up.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa beautifully expressed it, ‘Thus our ascent is unending. We go from beginning to beginning by way of beginnings without end.’[ix]
Secondly, and more importantly, knowing Moses’ state makes God’s response all the more stunning. God doesn’t respond to Moses’ identity anxiety by telling him the stories of Abraham or Jacob, or by inflating Moses’ sense of self. Rather, God’s reply –a reply that is echoed many times to many other people in the story of scripture— is ‘I will be’, or ‘I AM with you.’
We’ll come back to the ‘I AM’ in a moment.
But notice that God doesn’t tell Moses, about Moses. Moses may want to know about Moses. God wants Moses to know, and to trust God. Moses asks, ‘Who Am I?’ God replies, ‘I am and I will be with you.’
A few weeks back, in the week leading up to our last baptism service, I wasn’t in a good place mentally. My anxiety, depression and insecurity—shadows which often lurk in my world—were really chipping away at me. ‘Who am I?’ is a question I asked an awful lot that week. I found myself in a grey, murky rut for most of it.
That weekend, after the service, a couple I have known for some time, from Bury Fellowship, came up to me saying they had a word for me; they said, God wants you know, ‘I am with you.’
I’ve never had a word so on target. I told them that they had no idea how relevant those words were to what I had been struggling with that week.
They were comforting words—they always are. However, they are also a challenge.
As I prayed about the words afterwards, I felt that God was saying to me, ‘Tristan, stop fixating on who you are, and your self-worth, and your self-discovery. Fix your eyes on me.’
It was like, to use some lines from a song called Drops of Jupiter, God was saying, ‘Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?’[x]
Please hear me. Self-care is important, and I say this as someone who wrestles with depression. I say this in empathy, sympathy and love. But our quests for self—seeking self within the self—is sending us more and more down endless spirals, into an endless cycle of descent. When I get endlessly lost in the search for identity in the orifices of self, it never turns out well. Rather, I feel more helpless, worthless.
It matters not, who I am. What matters is the God who is with us.
You see, ‘It matters is not who Moses is; what matters is who is going with him’[xi]
WHO ARE YOU?
Which leads us to Moses’ second and important question. Understandably, Moses wants to know, ‘Who are you?’
Moses asks for a name in verse 13. In Hebrew, he’s asking for a shem. To know someone’s shem is to know who they are; their character, reputation, capability, not merely a name that they go by.
In verses 14 and 15, God replies. In the Hebrew, God says, ‘“ ‘Ehyeh-‘Asher-‘Ehyeh. Just tell them, ‘Ehyeh has sent me to you.” God also said, “Tell them, YHWH, the God of your ancestors…’[xii]
It’s a breathy and cryptic response. And the tense of God’s reply is as confusing in the original Hebrew as it is in the English. It can mean any number of things and be translated a number of ways. It can be translated as ‘I AM WHO I AM’, or ‘I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE’, or ‘I AM WHAT I WILL BE’, ‘I WILL BE WHAT I AM’, or even ‘I WILL BE WHAT, WHERE, OR HOW I WILL BE.’
It’s been understood as referring to God’s timelessness, God’s transcendent being, God’s freedom, God’s creativity and sovereignty. It’s been seen as referring to the past, the present and future sense of God. And because it can be taken to mean, ‘I cause to be’, it can be seen as God describing himself as the God who enters history and transforms it; that God is known, by people, not principally through His essence but through His acts.
Taken back to the Arabic, it can be even mean ‘Impassioned/Jealous love’. [xiii]
Maybe, simply speaking, God is saying, ‘I am the one who was, who is, and who will be.’[xiv]
‘I AM’
The bottom line, is that it is a description that oozes with mystery. And yet, that God reveals this name at all shows that God wants to be known. In revealing this name, God, to some extent becomes vulnerable and intimate with Moses. God is a God of revelation.
However it’s understood, God uses this term ‘ehyeh (I AM/I cause to be) over and over. And it ‘expresses a continuous present stretching into the future.’ It speaks of faithful presence. Here is a God whose name speaks of solidarity and an accompanying presence with his people: ‘I am with you, here and now, and I will be with you there and then.’[xv]
‘I AM’
This nature isn’t only reflected in God saying he is like this within some cryptic name. This isn’t like false advertising, where the label on the box doesn’t match the contents. Or worse, when you ask for a burger at McDonalds and then, when it comes, it looks nothing like the picture.
God is not solely giving Moses a label. God’s displays this very nature to Moses in the burning bush. Because this isn’t some great big fancy tree, you know, or a beautiful ornate rose bush. In the Hebrew, it is a sᵊnê (a play on the word Sinai, and possibly where the word Sinai comes from). A sᵊnê is a scrawny-looking, lowly, thorn bush.
God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth; the maker of all that makes us go ‘wow—the swirling and colourful nebulas of deep space; the majestic, churning oceans; the vibrant sunsets; the aromatic meadows… this God, appears in a thorn bush!
And in Horeb, of all places! Horeb, a name that literally means desolation.
What is going on? Simply this, God is showing us what he is like.
The medieval Rabbi, Rashi, when he looked at this scene, described God’s being in a thorn bush, in a place of desolation, as an expression of God sharing in the suffering of the Hebrew people in Egypt.[xvi]
Again, it’s solidarity: ‘I AM with you.’
In God’s words in Exodus 3:7-9, God repeats the terms that he has seen and heard the people’s suffering. In the backend of verse 7, God claims that he knows their suffering. Some translators word this as God saying he is ‘concerned’ (NIV), or that he is ‘aware’ (NLT). But the weight of the original language (yada) is not that God just has head knowledge about this, but that he, in some sense experiences it. God knows this suffering from the inside, so to speak, not as some spectator on the outside.
God is not sat in some lofty heavenly palace, eating fine-dining-quality food from golden plates, like Pharaoh possibly would be, while the people suffer in squalor. God is suffering with them, in the thorns, in the desolation of it all.
Again, ‘I AM with you.’
As I have said, Moses cannot identify with the people of Israel; he’s never shared in their experience. I’m not certain how much empathy and understanding he has to lead these people. As we’ll see, this is something he needs to learn. Maybe, Moses is aware that the people of Israel would be wondering this, as well?
But here, in a thorny bush, in a place of desolation, Moses encounters the God who knows, who shares in the suffering of people.
To repeat, Moses matters not. He is not the star of this show, or who the people need. What the people need to know is that God is with them.
KING OF THORNS
Depending on what Moses knows about God, or ‘gods’, he may have been tempted to think about God in the way he had been educated to think about the gods of Egypt or even Pharaoh himself. But God is not like those so-called gods, and nor is he like pharaoh.
Unlike Pharaoh, who keeps his hands clean and just orders people about, God is involved and alongside his people. Unlike Pharaoh, who consumes, devours and enslaves people for his purposes, God empowers and enlivens, releases and embraces, inviting people to his purposes.
As the late Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks described, ‘The free God seeks the free worship of free human beings.’[xvii]
God’s not like Pharaoh. His presence pulses with the heat of compassion and sympathy.[xviii] So much so, that Moses instinctively feels he can speak freely in God’s presence, knowing this God sees and this God hears.[xix]
As Exodus 3:18 declares, and as we explored in the first week, the great ‘I AM’ is the God of the Hebrews; the God who is with the suffering and who suffers with them. Yes, the Scriptures tell us that God is the Creator and the Almighty, but here, in this bush, is a key moment of God’s self-revelation to people: that God is enthroned among the thorns.[xx]
In the New Testament, in John’s gospel, the name ‘I AM’ is one that Jesus repeatedly claimed, applying to his own self (Jn. 6:35, 48; 8:12, 58; 9:5; 10:7, 9, 11; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1; 18:4-9). As God, Jesus knows our suffering, he entered into it, experienced it. On the cross, on the hilltop of Golgotha, crowned with thorns, Jesus, God incarnate, knew desolation.
Just like God shared in the suffering of his people to bring them out of bondage under Egypt, in Christ, God shares in our suffering to bring humanity, as a whole, out of its bondage to sin, death and Satan.
As modelled in the first sign (in fact, all the signs) God gives Moses (Ex. 4:2-9), Jesus is the one who has come to take hold of humanity, in its state of being cast down by the lies of the serpent, and to lift them back up again as shepherds, as stewards of God’s good creation.[xxi] Through his own lifting up, like the serpent in the wilderness, he would draw many to himself (Jn. 3:14; 12:32).
He is the one whose affliction and rejection, by the violent hands of humanity, in such an accursed way, would reconcile humanity to the Father: the one who came from the bosom of the Father (Jn. 1:18) to bring us back to the bosom of the Father. As the great shepherd, he would enfold us in his robes and carry us home (Jn. 10:11-16; Isa. 40:11).
He is the one whose water and blood, poured out on the ground, will bring life, and pleads, not for vengeance, like Abel’s blood did, but forgiveness (Jn. 19:34-35; Heb. 12:24)
This is our God: the one who suffers with us, on our behalf, and in whose suffering we find life.
What a revelation!
I do go ‘wow’, when I behold creation, knowing God is Creator. But my jaw drops when I consider that God is ‘I AM’, that God is ‘with us’, that God is co-suffering love. This simply takes my breath away.
SANDALS
Of course, having this revelation is not about gaining information about God. God shows this, God displays this, God reveals himself to Moses, and us, because it is an invitation to us to trust him.
This is why God invites Moses to take of his sandals.
We could have some long conversations about what Holy Ground is and Holy Ground isn’t. But regardless of the definition, God, in this scene, is not telling Moses to back off! Neither is God saying, ‘don’t bring your dirty feet in here’, like we do whenever we have a new carpet fitted.
We have recently had our bathroom refitted. You know how a bathroom works, right? It’s the place where you go to get clean. In other words, you take your dirt in there with you in order to be washed up. And yet, as uber-protective ‘new bathroom’ owners, we’re wrongly, insanely, telling our kids not to take their dirt in there!
Yes, we probably do need therapy.
Holy Ground is not to be viewed in the way we view our new bathroom.
God can handle our dirty feet! In fact, Jesus was willing to wash them (Jn. 13)!
Rather than saying ‘back off’, when God asks Moses to remove his sandals, God is inviting Moses to get in on this revelation with all that he is.
Take your shoes off, if you have them on, and place your feet on solid ground. It’s an entirely different sensation with shoes off, then with shoes on. What do shoes and sandals do? They insulate us from the ground, making us insensitive to it. Taking off your sandals is a way of fully embracing this holy ground. That’s what God is asking, wanting from Moses: go barefoot with the Divine.[xxii]
Removing your sandals was also, in some of the stories in Bible, a sign that you are relinquishing your rights, your ownership (Ruth 4:7-8, is a good example). It was a sign of humility and of entrusting yourself—who you are and what you have—to another.
Going barefoot is an entrusting embrace.
I don’t know about you, but I need to be absolutely certain I’m on safe ground before I remove my shoes and walk barefoot.
I don’t go walking barefoot around my local streets. There’s stuff I have stepped in whilst wearing shoes that I would not want to get in between my toes, not to mention the fragments of glass and sharp stone. If Corban’s had his Lego out, I’ll even check twice before stepping barefoot across our own living room carpet! Embracing a lego block with the sole of your foot is torture, let me tell you.
I want to know the environment is trustworthy.
The God who suffers with us, for us, the God who is ‘I AM’, is trustworthy. In his presence, you can go barefoot.
If you don’t know who you are, trust in who God declares to be. Even If you do know who you are, don’t put confidence in that, trust in who God declares to be. Because it doesn’t matter who you are, whether you have it figured out or not; what matters is the One who goes with us.
‘And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’
Jesus, Matthew 28:20
‘“I am who I am” means, “I am there, wherever it may be . . . . I am really there!”’
Th. C. Vrieson [xxiii]
END NOTES
[i] Alice and the Caterpillar, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
[ii] We’ll come back to the names Horeb and Sinai. For now, it’s interesting that Exodus 3:1 also identifies this as the mountain of God (Elohim). This identification has always raised some interesting questions. Could it be that this place was already a place of Midianite worship? After all, Jethro/Reuel, Moses’ father-in-law, is identified as a ‘priest of God (Elohim)’. So this is possible. However, there is also another valid explanation. As Walter Moberly notes, the phrase (mountain of God) could be anecdotal, i.e., a term that comes from the perspective of the author writing this after the event, because of what happened there in this story. In other words, this phrase doesn’t reflect the perspective of the characters in the story, such as Moses or Jethro, but the awareness of the speaker of this story and their immediate audience. [Walter Moberly, The Old Testament in the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), pp. 8-10].
Whatever the case may be, it is surprisingly significant that the precise location of Mt. Sinai/Horeb is never noted and seen as unimportant in later Israelite tradition, and this story. As Christopher J. H. Wright remarks, ‘[Sinai] never became a place of pilgrimage in the way that Mount Zion [Jerusalem] would become. The only person [in scripture] to intentionally go back there was Elijah [1 Kings 19]. It was sufficient for the faith of Israel to know that the place did exist, that God had met with Moses there, and later revealed himself and his word there with earth-shaking effect. The memory, the story, the texts, the Ten words, the covenant, the tabernacle and its sacrificial system, the indicatives and imperatives of Sinai—all these were far more important than the physical site itself.’ [Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), footnote 6, p. 96, brackets mine]
[iii] I’m reminded of the lines from Elizabeth Barratt-Browning’s famous poem, Aurora Leigh: ‘Earth’s crammed with heaven | And every common bush afire with God: | But only he who sees, takes off his shoes’
[iv] As we saw in the first session of this journey through Exodus, Genesis themes echo throughout the Exodus story. The name Gershom, along with Moses’ own exile from Egypt invoke the memory of Hagar, Abraham’s second wife, as recorded in Genesis 16 & 21. Her story is a surprising, albeit, inverted, parallel of the situation that of the Israelite’s in Egypt. Hagar was an Egyptian and a slave of Sarai, most likely given to Sarai when she and Abram left Egypt after deceiving the current Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10-20, esp’ 16). Later in the story, Sarai gives Hagar to Abram as a second wife, and when Hagar becomes pregnant (should we say, fruitful and multiplies), Sarai grows jealous and angry towards Hagar. As such, as Gen. 16:6 implies, Sarai harshly deals with Hagar, driving her away. The word translated harshly or mistreated is the same word Exodus 1:11 employs to describe the Egyptian’s treatment of Israel in their slavery: it means oppressed. Ironically then, Genesis presents the matriarch of all Israelites oppressing an Egyptian slave, whereas Exodus tells of an Egyptian patriarch oppressing Israelites as slaves. As Victor P. Hamilton put it, ‘To that degree, Sarah foreshadows pharaoh’s role, just as Hagar’s story prefigures Israel’s story’ [Exodus: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), p. 9].
[v] The writer of Hebrews, in Heb. 11:24-26, also insinuates Moses reaching a sense of maturity, not solely in age, but in a desire to see his own people with the goal of identifying as one of them.
[vi] The story of Exodus never tells us how old Moses was when he left Egypt. The Hebrew language in Exodus 2:11 merely states that he had reached maturity: when he had ‘grown up’ he went to see his people’s situation. Exodus 7:7, however, does mention that Moses was 80 yrs old when he faced Pharaoh (with Aaron being three years older). In Acts 7:23, Stephen, reflecting the common consensus of Jewish tradition, reports that Moses was forty when he went out to see the plight of the Israelite slavery and then fled from Egypt.
[vii] Ready for another Genesis echo? The repetition of a name is not uncommon in scripture—it denotes urgency, and God uses it in the case of Abraham (Gen. 22:11) and Samuel (1 Sam 3:10). However, this particular scene in Exodus 3, with its repetition and what follows it, clearly serves as an echo of Genesis 46.
In Genesis 46:3, God gives that great promise, a promise we looked at in week one of this series, where God promises to go with Jacob into Egypt and bring him back again. This promise is invoked here, at the burning bush, in what we call a type-scene—a replay, sort of, of a scene carrying similar overtones.
In Genesis 46:2, the scene begins with God appearing to Jacob in a dream vision. Like here, in Exodus 3:4, God calls twice to Jacob, ‘Jacob! Jacob!’ Like Moses, Jacob replies, ‘Here I am.’ And then God introduces himself to Jacob, as he later does with Moses, using the words, ‘I am the God of your Father/ancestor… .’ Then Genesis records God giving the promise to go with and bring back Israel. God’s words in Exodus 7-10, as we’ll come to see, show that God has been with his people during this time, and that he has come to lead them back.
But there’s more …
Another element of Jacob’s story is reflected in this story of the burning bush, an encounter bristling with the meanings of names. Way back in Genesis 32:22-30, Jacob had a night-time wrestle with a Divine encounter. In that story, Jacob asks for the name of who he has wrestled with. He’s asking for more than a label—Jacob already uses the name in his prayer in 32:9-12. Jacob wants to know more clearly the character behind the name. When Jacob asks, what is your name, he is effectively saying, ‘reveal yourself to me, give me a fuller understanding of yourself.’ In Jacob’s story, God enigmatically replies, ‘Why do you ask?’ It’s not a harsh denial, it is more of a, ‘not yet.’
In Moses’ story, at the bush, like Jacob, he asks for a name. Again, not a mere label, but a revealing of nature, a fuller understanding of God. This time, however, God grants the request, giving more than a label, but a theology in the name YHWH.
These echoes with Jacob’s story at the Burning Bush—in fact all these echoes of Genesis seen in Exodus—help reinforce the same point. In the words of Newsome, ‘This is no new god whom Moses is about to meet, but the very same God who has guided the Hebrews in earlier generations.’ [James D. Newsome Jr, Exodus, Interpretation Bible Studies (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1998) p 16). Or, in another commentators words, ‘The point is clearly to establish the single continuous identity of the living God across generations. Both Isaac and Jacob were assured that the God with whom they were engaged is the God who had accompanied their own father and that the same promises made to past generation still apply to the next one. Moses is being similarly reminded of the faith of his own father—and mother.’ [Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 92].
[viii] In Egypt, some the most powerful rulers used this naming convention as a way of speaking of their divine lineage and divine right to rule. In fancy speak, we call this naming convention theophoric. In Moses’ case, the initial ‘god-element’ of the name, present in Rameses and Ahmoses, for example, is missing. This has led a number of scholars to speculate as to whether Moses was initially given a ‘god-element’ to his name, such as ‘Hapi-moses’ (who was God of the Nile), by his mother, that he later dropped. We honestly don’t know, but it is interesting to think about. (See, Ralph K. Hawkins, Discovering Exodus (SPCK, London, 2021), p. 43; H. Junia Pokrifka, Exodus: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition, New Beacon Bible Commentary (Beacon Hill Press, Kansa City, MO, 2018), p. 62; Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 78.)
Regardless of whether Moses dropped a god-element to his name or not, his name still begged the question, by anyone familiar with this Egyptian convention, of ‘who is he born of?’ And thus, Moses’ name leads others to seek a further name (I think especially of the Egyptians that would have left Egypt with the Israelites). As it happens, in this particular passage, a name, the name, is revealed—God shares his name, ‘YHWH’ to Moses. However, unlike Egyptian naming conventions, Moses does not adopt the name ‘YHWH’ as the missing god-element of some theophoric title. Or, if the case was that he originally had a ‘god-element’ that he later dropped, he does not swap it out for this. He remains, Moses, claiming no divine lineage or rank. This tells us something important about Israel’s theological view in contrast to the religious cults, especially Egypt’s, around them: God identified with them, but they did not identify themselves as being God.
Of course, many names in the Old Testament carry a component referencing God’s name, be it Joshua (Yahweh delivers/saves), Josiah (Yahweh heals/supports) or Jeremiah (Yahweh loosens). However, the difference here is that these names make a theological declaration about God’s nature and acts. They are not an individual’s declaration to be ‘begotten of God.’ Even where the naming comes close, as in Bithiah/Batyah, meaning daughter of Yah, this is not a claim of genealogy or lineage.
Maybe, this Egyptian-naming convention, especially in the Pharaoh-like use of it, is in the background behind the third commandment (Ex. 20:7)?
[ix] St. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs
[x] ‘Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)’, by Train, Track 3 on the album Drops of Jupiter (2001)
[xi] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 105
[xii] The name God gives to Moses here is literally four consonants in the text, y-h-w-h, and is typically known as the tetragrammaton, which is a fancy way of saying, ‘the four letters’. YHWH may be the verbal form of the Hebrew root word ‘to be’ (hwyh / hāyâ). It’s commonly thought to be pronounced Yahweh (the translation of Jehovah arose during the Middle Ages through a misunderstanding of the pronunciation, and is not true to the linguistic form). Although, there are a few commentators who suggest that the name is purposely configured out of letters that make it impossible to sound out, and therefore speak.
Most English translations follow an old convention of simply rendering the name, ‘The Lord’, whenever it appears in the text. The reason for this; the name Yahweh took on extraordinary significance in later Judaism. By the Achaemenid period of the Persian empire (550 – 330 BC), a custom developed about not pronouncing the name. When Jews encounter the name in the text, in liturgy, public readings, or everyday conversation, they would substitute it with expressions like ‘The Lord’ (Adonai, in Greek) or ‘the Name’ (Hashem, in Hebrew). This custom was later enshrined in the formulation of the Mishnah and the Talmud. As Ralph Hawkins notes, ‘it seems clear, however, that the name of God was spoken among the Ancient Hebrews. The Priestly Benediction (Num. 6:24-26), for example, which was to be spoken over the people, includes three pronouncements of the name of Yahweh…. When Boaz passed through the field, he greeted the reapers by saying, ‘The Lord be with you’, and they answered with the reply, ‘The Lord bless you’ (Ruth 2:4). The cessation of pronouncing the Tetragrammaton was a later development.’ [Ralph K. Hawkins, Discovering Exodus (SPCK, London, 2021), p. 52-54]
[xiii] For a number of discussions around this see: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Faith in the Future (https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/shemot/faith-in-the-future/); Prof. Israel Knohl, YHWH: The Original Arabic Meaning of the Name (https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-original-arabic-meaning-of-the-name ) ; Ralph K. Hawkins, Discovering Exodus (SPCK, London, 2021), p. 52-54; Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p.117-119; James D. Newsome Jr, Exodus, Interpretation Bible Studies (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1998) p. 18-19; Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Volume 1, The Five Books of Moses (W. W. Norton, London, 2019), pp. 222-223.
[xiv] This sense is certainly present in its use in Revelation 1:8.
[xv] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p.110
[xvi] Rashi on Exodus 3:2:2, ‘OUT OF THE MIDST OF A BUSH (a thornbush) – and not from any other tree, in accordance with the idea (Psalm 91:15) “I will be with him in trouble” (Midrash Tanchuma, Shemot 14)
[xvii] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, New Milford, CT, 2020), p. 11
[xviii] With regards to the presence of fire in this scene, and its symbolic significance, I will borrow some words from the famous Baptist preacher, Alexander MacLaren, and his sermon entitled, THE BUSH THAT BURNED, AND DID NOT BURN OUT:
“[F]ire is distinctly a divine symbol, a symbol of God not of affliction, as the ordinary explanation implies. I need not do more than remind you of the stream of emblem which runs all through Scripture, as confirming this point. There are the smoking lamp and the blazing furnace in the early vision granted to Abraham. There is the pillar of fire by night, that lay over the desert camp of the wandering Israelites. There is Isaiah’s word, ‘The light of Israel shall be a flaming fire.’ There is the whole of the New Testament teaching, turning on the manifestation of God through His Spirit. There are John the Baptist’s words, ‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.’ There is the day of Pentecost, when the ‘tongues of fire sat upon each of them.’ And what is meant by the great word of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘Our God is a consuming fire’?
“Not Israel only, but many other lands—it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say, all other lands—have used the same emblem with the same meaning. In almost every religion on the face of the earth, you will find a sacred significance attached to fire. That significance is not primarily destruction, as we sometimes suppose, an error which has led to ghastly misunderstandings of some Scriptures, and of the God whom they reveal. When, for instance, (Isaiah 33:14) asks, ‘Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?’ he has been supposed to be asking what human soul is there that can endure the terrors of God’s consuming and unending wrath. But a little attention to the words would have shown that ‘the devouring fire’ and the ‘everlasting burnings’ mean God and not hell, and that the divine nature is by them not represented as too fierce to be approached, but as the true dwelling-place of men, which indeed only the holy can inhabit, but which for them is life. Precisely parallel is the Psalmist’s question, ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place?’
“Fire is the source of warmth, and so, in a sense, of life. It is full of quick energy, it transmutes all kinds of dead matter into its own ruddy likeness, sending up the fat of the sacrifices in wreathes of smoke that aspire heavenward; and changing all the gross, heavy, earthly dullness into flame, more akin to the heaven into which it rises.
“Therefore, as cleansing, as the source of life, light, warmth, change, as glorifying, transmuting, purifying, refining, fire is the fitting symbol of the mightiest of all creative energy. And the Bible has consecrated the symbolism, and bade us think of the Lord Himself as the central fiery Spirit of the whole universe, a spark from whom irradiates and vitalises everything that lives.”
[xix] As Newsome puts it, ‘The burning bush and the magical staff are all impressive to be sure, but neither reveals the nature of God as dramatically as the manner in which God responds to Moses’ protests.’ James D. Newsome Jr, Exodus, Interpretation Bible Studies (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1998) p. 22
[xx] God, in revealing such solidarity and pathos with humanity is overturning alternate ancient conceptions of ‘god’. Especially conceptions of ‘gods’ that had to be allured to see or hear, that were fickle in their ways, and who demanded no loyalty and showed no loyalty. When we read of these encounters, we must remember that God speaks into an ancient world populated with ‘gods’ and ideas about ‘gods’. The discussion about whether these ‘gods’ are real spiritual entities or imaginary is a huge one. Nevertheless, regardless of the conclusions on such debates, the people of the time did think and act within such worldviews. For Moses, with all his Egyptian training, this experience would have been world shaking as well as jarring. Maybe, another reason for Moses asking his second question is that he never even imagined a God behaving like this, in such lowliness and solidarity.
[xxi] The word serpent in Exodus 4:3 is the word nāḥāš/nachash, the same word used to describe the serpent in Genesis 3:1. Tellingly, when Moses and Aaron perform this miracle later in the story to a different audience (Pharaoh, Exodus 7:8-13), the Hebrew uses the term tannin. This term also means serpent and could, in this scene, have meant that the staff turned into a Nile crocodile, as opposed to a snake like in Exodus 4 (where the sign is performed before the Israelite elders). Though it’s a different term, tannin is also used to convey an evil power opposed to God, sometimes translated as monster/dragon, like in Jer. 51:34 and Ezek. 29:3. Both terms express something emblematic of the powerful chaotic forces God overcomes.
For some thoughts on humanity’s role as a shepherd/steward of creation, please refer to an older post of mine: OUR WORLD (PT 2) // STEWARDS: CURATORS OF SHALOM
[xxii] H. Junia Pokrifka, in her commentary on Exodus, also makes the point that footwear was not prescribed as part of the priestly vestments in Exodus 28, therefore insightfully suggesting that the priests ministered barefoot in the Tabernacle. I think there is a lot going for this suggestion; in the instructions for the priestly garments, everything gets covered from headwear to underwear, with not a single reference to footwear. H. Junia Pokrifka, Exodus: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition, New Beacon Bible Commentary (Beacon Hill Press, Kansa City, MO, 2018), p. 71
[xxiii] Quoted in Brevard S. Childs. The Book of Exodus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), p. 69, as quoted in Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, UK, 2005), p. 159
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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