Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Exodus · About this commentary
The Bush That Was Not Consumed
Exodus 3:1-12
1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb. · WEB
God appears in fire that destroys nothing, and the sign given to a reluctant man is not proof beforehand but company throughout.
Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God's mountain, to Horeb Exodus 3:1.
An ordinary working day, in the emptiest place in the story, at the mountain afterward called Mt Sinai . The narrator calls it God's mountain before anything has happened there. Moses is eighty years old and looking for pasture.
Yahweh's angel appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the middle of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed Exodus 3:2.
Fire in a desert thornbush is not remarkable; a thornbush that goes on burning is. The sign is designed to be noticed slowly, by a man willing to stand and watch, and its content lies in what does not happen. Fire ordinarily takes what it touches. This fire does not, and what follows depends on that: God is about to come down among a people he could destroy by proximity, and the first thing he shows is a flame that leaves its host intact.
The one who speaks is called Yahweh's angel in verse two and God in verse four, without a seam. The alternation runs through the Torah wherever God appears in visible form, and it is not loose writing; Scripture speaks of one who is both sent and himself divine, and the pattern set here is completed only when that identity is claimed openly John 8:58.
Don't come close. Take off your sandals, for the place you are standing on is holy ground Exodus 3:5. Ground made holy by occupation, not by history. Nothing had happened at this spot the day before, and nothing needs to happen for it to be ordinary again afterward. Holiness in this book is never a property of places; it is the effect of a presence.
I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob Exodus 3:6. Long afterward this sentence is quoted as proof of the resurrection, on the ground that God is not the God of the dead but of the living Matthew 22:32. The argument does not require that the patriarchs are alive now. It requires that God still holds himself bound to men who died centuries ago, which is unintelligible unless he intends to raise them.
Then the commission, whose three verbs are the book's outline: I have surely seen... I have come down to deliver them... I will send you Exodus 3:7–10. The last of them is where the trouble starts, because deliverance turns out to be a job offer.
Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh? Exodus 3:11. Forty years earlier the answer would have come readily. The reply refuses the question entirely: certainly I will be with you Exodus 3:12. Moses asks about his own qualifications and is told about God's presence, which is the only answer that question ever receives in Scripture. And the token offered is useless as advance proof — when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain. The confirmation arrives after the obedience, and can only be read looking back.
settled What this mark means