On Narrative and Divine
Truth
The story of Moses speaking with
God at the burning bush at Mt. Horeb, another name for Mt. Sinai, is well known.
You’ll find the part of it I want to speak about here at Exodus 3:1-15. It’s a
really important story. It is the beginning of the foundational story of the
great Jewish faith. As story however is has several very odd things about it,
things that seem to me like narrative inadequacies. Do those inadequacies
affect the deeper truth of the story? Let’s take a look at them to see what we
can discover.
In this story Moses is tending the
flock of his father-in-law. We run into the first narrative oddity in the story
right away. The story says Moses led by flock “beyond the wilderness” to Mt. Horeb.
Why would he do that? He’s coming from Midian, which is in the northwest corner
of the Arabian peninsula. We don’t know exactly where Mt. Horeb/Sinai was, but
it had to have been some distance from Midian across some of the most arid
territory on earth. Why would Moses lead his flock across that desolate
landscape where it is nearly impossible to find water? It sure seems like he
wouldn’t, but the story says he did.
Then we encounter what seems to us
like a significant inconsistency in the story. We read first that “an angel of
the Lord” appeared to Moses out of
a burning bush. Then it says that God spoke to Moses out of the bush. Which is
it? An angel of the Lord or the Lord? Why does the story have this
apparent inconsistency? Perhaps the explanation is that in ancient Hebrew
literature the phrase “an angel of the Lord”
actually means the Lord. Still, to
us modern readers it sounds like we’ve got a significant inconsistency here.
Then the story says Moses did
something odd. When he sees the bush that is burning but is not burned up he
speaks. We read that he “said, I must turn aside and look….” at the burning
bush. Why would Moses say anything here. Who’s he talking to? There’s no human
present other than Moses. Was he talking to the sheep? Why doesn’t the text say
he thought this thing rather than he said it? Perhaps we’re just dealing here
with ancient storytelling conventions, but it does seem odd, to me at least,
that Moses speaks.
Then God says something that also
seems odd. God says that God has heard the cries of the Israelites in Egypt.
Did that just happen? Wouldn’t God have known what was going on with God’s
people in Egypt from the beginning? Why now? Exodus tells us that between the
time of Joseph and the time of Moses the number of Israelites in Egypt had
grown very substantially, to the point where there were, the story says, more
Israelites in Egypt than Egyptians. Exodus 1:9. That didn’t happen overnight.[1]
The Israelites didn’t become enslaved and oppressed overnight. Why is God
acting now when God hadn’t acted before? The story doesn’t tell us.
Then God does something that seems
perfectly inconsistent, at least at first glance. God tells Moses that God has
come down to free the people from their enslavement and oppression in Egypt. That’s
good, but then God tells Moses that he, Moses, is actually going to be the one
to lead the people out of Egypt. Why would God first say God was going to do
it, then tell Moses that Moses was the one who was going to do it? The closest
the story comes to explaining that inconsistency is that it has God tell Moses
that God will be with him as he does the job. Fair enough, and certainly true;
but still Moses not God is the one who’s supposed to go to Pharaoh and tell him
to let the people go. Again this aspect of the story seems odd.
Then God tells Moses something
about a sign for him that the task on which he is to embark really comes from
God. God tells Moses that the sign for him will be that when he has led the
people out of Egypt they will worship God at Mt. Horeb/Sinai. Say what? The
sign that this assignment comes from God isn’t going to be given until after
the job is done? What sense does that make? Moreover, why would Moses need a
sign at all? He’s standing there barefoot talking directly with God. Sure seems
like that would be sign enough, but the story talks about this later sign as
well. Perhaps it’s just literary foreshadowing, for we know that the people did
worship God at that mountain after they got out of Egypt.
Then God gives Moses God’s divine
name. God’s name is YHWH. The name itself is a divine mystery. It is
untranslatable. The NRSV tells us that it is related to the Hebrew verb for “to
be,” namely, “hayah.” The NRSV renders it as “I
am who I am.” It then gives the alternative translations “I am what I am” and “I will be what I will be.” Then God
shortens the name for Moses and for us. God says to Moses that he is to say to
the Israelites “I am” has sent
him. Most names in the Hebrew Bible mean something. “Israel,” for example,
means one who struggles with God. This divine name either doesn’t mean anything
or, better, it means something that transcends mere human meaning that human words
cannot really express.
We have to ask however: Would that
name have meant anything to the Israelites in Egypt? Although the text of the
Hebrew Bible has used the name already by the time we get to Exodus, see for
example Genesis 4:4,[2] this
story in chapter 3 of Exodus is the first time in the biblical narrative that
God’s divine name has been revealed. The Israelites in Egypt presumably had
never heard it before, yet the Lord
seems to suggest that the name will nonetheless assure them that their God
really had sent Moses to them. Doesn’t make much sense, does it.
Then God tells Moses to say to the
Israelites in Egypt that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has sent Moses to
them. Well, OK, but would that have meant anything to the enslaved Israelites
in Egypt? Would they even have heard of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Perhaps, but
in this story a long time has passed since the days of those Hebrew patriarchs,
and these stories are set in a time long before any of them were written down. The
only way the Israelites in Egypt would have heard of those men would be if the
stories about them had been passed on through oral storytelling. Perhaps they
were, but if not then those names wouldn’t have meant a thing to the people to
whom God was sending Moses. When we read this story carefully it becomes
perfectly obvious that it has some significant narrative limitations.
Yet for all those limitations this
story is of immense importance in both Judaism and Christianity. It is the
beginning of what scholars call the salvation history of Israel. It sets in
motion the events that eventually get the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. The
Hebrew Bible uses the divine name YHWH throughout its many different texts. In
the Gospel of John Jesus identifies himself using the divine name. See for
example John 18:5-6. In the NRSV translation Jesus identifies himself to those
come to arrest him by saying when they say they’re looking for Jesus “I am he.”
Yet the Greek original here doesn’t say “I am he,” as a translator’s note tells
us. It says I am, ego emi in the Greek. Jesus uses the divine name of
God from his Jewish faith to identify himself as divine. In Christian worship
and hymnody we sometimes call God “the great I am.”
I want to ask: How can a story with
so many narrative limitations come to have such great significance for two of
the world’s great monotheistic religions?[3] It
can because we’re dealing here with two different kinds of truth, and the
second of them does not depend on the first. When we critique the telling of a
story as I have done here with the story of Moses at the burning bush we are dealing
with narrative truth. We are dealing with story as story, with literary
creation as literary creation. A story may be told well, or it may be told
badly. It may be told in accordance with our modern criteria for good
storytelling or in accordance with the criteria for good storytelling of the
time in which the story originated, and those two are rarely the same.
There is however a different kind
of truth. We can call it mythic truth, or metaphorical truth, or spiritual
truth, or divine truth. By whatever name we call it this truth comes to us
through story, but it does not depend on the quality of the story as story. The
story is not itself the truth. Rather, a story that conveys this kind of truth,
and the story of Moses at the burning bush definitely does, points beyond
itself to a truth that is much deeper than mere story. It points us to a divine
truth that we can discern or sense but that no words can ever really capture. This
kind of story, of which the Bible is full, conveys divine truth, but it doesn’t
do it by relating facts whether those facts are told elegantly or inelegantly.
It does it by directing our attention beyond itself to the truth that lies
beneath all truth and beyond all words, the truth of God.
Does the story of Moses at the
burning bush convey spiritual truth in that way? Yes, of course it does. We
wouldn’t still be paying attention to it if it didn’t. We start with he truth
of the divine name. That name is very, very ancient, yet it is also perfectly
contemporary. It points to the truth that God is somehow related to being. The
great twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich called God the ground of being
and even being itself. YHWH fits perfectly with that understanding of the
nature of God. Ancient Israel called God essentially “to be.” When we make God
less than being itself we turn God into an idol. The great Hebrew name of God,
YHWY, points us toward that most profound spiritual truth.
This story points us toward another
spiritual truth. It is the beginning of the story of God’s desire that the
Hebrew people be liberated from slavery. Over the centuries it has told enslaved
people in different times and places that God wants them liberated too. When
enslaved people in the American south sang “God down, Moses, way down in Egypt
land. Tell ol’ Pharaoh, to let my people go” they weren’t just singing about
something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They
were singing about their own longing for freedom and about God’s will that they
too be freed from the injustice, oppression, and exploitation of the system of
slavery, that they too be recognized as fully human men and women and treated
with the respect due to all men and women. That God wants that kind of freedom
and dignity for all people is a profound spiritual truth behind the story of
the Exodus, and that truth is independent of the adequacy or inadequacy of the
story as story. It is even independent of whether or not the story ever
actually happened as an historical event. For all of its narrative inadequacies
story of the Exodus points us toward that divine truth. And for that all we can
say is: Thanks be to God!
[1]
Actually it almost certainly never happened at all. There are no Egyptian
records that suggest any such thing. Here however I’m dealing with how the text
tells the story, not with whether or not the story ever happened as an
historical matter.
[2]
When the word Lord is printed that
way in small caps we know that the Hebrew original is YHWH. For an English
translation that uses Yahweh rather than Lord
for YHWH see the Roman Catholic translation The New Jerusalem Bible.
[3] All
three of them actually, for Islam too considers Moses to have been a great prophet
of God.
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