Burning bush

The burning bush (or the unburnt bush) refers to an event recorded in the Jewish Torah (as also in the biblical Old Testament). It is described in the third chapter of the Book of Exodus as having occurred on Mount Horeb. According to the biblical account, the bush was on fire, but was not consumed by the flames, hence the name. In the biblical narrative, the burning bush is the location at which Moses was appointed by Yahweh to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan. The Hebrew word in the narrative that is translated into English as bush is seneh ( səne), which refers in particular to brambles; seneh is a biblical dis legomenon, only appearing in two places, both of which describe the burning bush. The use of seneh may be a deliberate pun on Sinai (), a feature common in Hebrew texts. In the narrative, an angel of the Lord is described as appearing in a bush, and God is subsequently described as calling out from it to Moses, who had been grazing Jethro's flocks there. When Moses starts to approach, God tells Moses to take off his sandals first, due to the place being holy ground. The voice from the bush (who later self-discloses as Yahweh) reveals that he is "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Moses hides his face. Some Old Testament scholars regard the account of the burning bush as being spliced together from the Yahwist and Elohist texts, with the angel of Yahweh and the removal of sandals being part of the Yahwist version, and the Elohist's parallels to these being God and the turning away of Moses's face, respectively. The text portrays Yahweh as telling Moses that he is sending him to the Pharaoh in order to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, an action that Yahweh is described as having decided upon as a result of noticing that the Israelites were being oppressed by the Egyptians. Yahweh tells Moses to tell the elders of the Israelites that Yahweh would lead them into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Hivites, and Jebusites, a region generally referred to as a whole by the term Canaan; this is described as being a land of "milk and honey".

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Related concepts (28)

Burning bush

The Exodus

The Exodus (Hebrew: יציאת מצרים, Yeẓi'at Miẓrayim: Departure from Egypt) is the founding myth of the Israelites whose narrative is spread over four books of the Torah (or Pentateuch, corresponding to the first five books of the Bible), namely Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The consensus of modern scholars is that the Pentateuch does not give an accurate account of the origins of the Israelites, who appear instead to have formed as an entity in the central highlands of Canaan in the late second millennium BCE from the indigenous Canaanite culture.

Eastern Orthodoxy

Eastern Orthodoxy, otherwise known as Eastern Orthodox Christianity or Byzantine Christianity, is one of the three main branches of Chalcedonian Christianity, alongside Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Like the Pentarchy of the first millennium, the mainstream (or "canonical") Eastern Orthodox Church is organised into autocephalous churches independent from each other. In the 21st century, the number of mainstream autocephalous churches is seventeen; there also exist autocephalous churches unrecognized by those mainstream ones.