NOTES for Exo 3:1-22

It is customary to think that after seventy, or certainly after eighty, a person has only to rest and sum up his life. Among the Semites in Moses' time this point came even earlier: the active age was considered to be from twenty to sixty, forty years, the length of one generation. With Moses everything turned out quite differently. For him everything most important began after eighty. That was when he met God. The meeting was unexpected for Moses.

In the wilderness he saw a burning bush. It was one of those bushes that resemble tumbleweed, though much larger, the kind often found in the Sinai wilderness. Sometimes they really do burst into flame from the heat of the sun; in summer, on the ground, the temperature in the sun can reach seventy degrees here. The point, however, was that the bush burned suspiciously long: usually they flare up and burn quickly, like paper. Coming closer, Moses understood that before him was not physical fire, but something else: a shining cloud that had descended upon the bush. In this way God marked on earth the place of His presence.

This was something new: the Hebrews had known nothing like it before. Moses, of course, knew all the traditions about the God of the fathers, for until school, until the age of five or six, he had remained with his mother, whom Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted Moses, had hired as a nurse. In those days boys remained with their mother or nurse until entering school. During his early childhood Moses undoubtedly had to remember, from his mother's retelling, the traditions of his people, including the stories about the God of the fathers that already existed then.

Here, however, was something of which no traditions spoke: such theophanies were not mentioned in them. The newness was not only that God revealed Himself to Moses in a radiance that from a distance Moses took for fire. The most important thing lay elsewhere: God had come in order to stay. To stay among His people, with whom He wanted to meet here, by one of the spurs of Sinai. To meet with them in order to make a covenant with them and then lead them Himself. This was a new revelation, good news promising liberation and the fulfillment of the promises given long before to Abraham. At last the time had come for those promises to be fulfilled, and Moses was to play the main role in their fulfillment.