Tag Archives: Mt. Sinai

Moses = Burning Bushes and Building Bridges

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Moses encounters the Logos, the Word of God, at the Burning Bush in the icon of Our Lady of the Burning Bush in the upper right corner of the icon; see the detail from a contemporary icon as well.


Moses was the lynchpin between God and Israel; as the Serbian proverb goes, he was the neck that turned the head (connecting the head—God—to the body, which was Israel). His encounter at the bush, as he was tending Jethro’s flocks, becomes an image of the Incarnation as the bush that burned but was not consumed is a foreshadowing of the Virgin who gave birth to God without loss of her virginity.

According to Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!), the Hebrew word in the story that is translated into English as bush is seneh(סנה‎) 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 (סיני‎), a feature common in Hebrew texts. (That the burning bush is a bramble bush also associates it with the bramble bush which is an important part of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.)

At the bush, Moses is commissioned to act as God’s mouthpiece, telling Pharaoh to “Let my people go” and telling the people of Israel what God wants from them. He is commissioned to build a bridge between God and the world—both the fallen world (Egypt) and the world being redeemed and healed (Israel). This role as the bridge builder between God and the world is essentially the role of a priest; one Latin word for priest is pontifex, which is literally “bridge builder.”

Even before Aaron is ordained as priest, Moses offers sacrifices to God on behalf of Israel. Moses builds the bridge between eternity and the world by his words and by sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, it was an especially meritorious act to leave money in your will to build a public bridge that did not charge a toll across a river. Building a toll free bridge was a priestly act, uniting two sides of the river as a priest unites worlds in the liturgical sacrifice and preaching. (Without a bridge, people might have to travel several miles—hours—out of their way to find a place to cross the river. A toll bridge, built by someone who wanted to make a profit on their construction investment, limited river crossing to the well-to-do; a toll free bridge was an image of Christ’s sacrifice freely available to all.)

Moses built a bridge between God and Israel. Israel, the priestly people commissioned at Mt. Sinai, built a bridge between God and the world. The Word-made-flesh, who spoke to Moses at the bush, built the ultimate bridge that brought together everything he was not with everything that he is. The Church, the Body of the Word-made-flesh, continues that ministry of bridge building.

Moses Atop Mt. Tabor and Mt. Sinai

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The Transfiguration of Christ: Part of an iconostasis from Mt. Sinai in the style of Constantinople (mid-12th century). We see the Prophet Elijah as an older man beside Christ and Moses, holding a copy of the Law given to him on Mt. Sinai, on Christ’s other side. St. Peter kneels below Elijah, with St. John the Divine below Christ and St. James below Moses.

Christ took the apostles Peter, James, and John the Divine to the top of Mt. Tabor to pray. The apostles fell asleep. When they awoke, they saw Christ transfigured–more brilliant than the sun–and Moses was there, with the Prophet Elijah, speaking with Christ about the Passion that Christ would soon experience in Jerusalem. (Moses and Elijah–the primary representatives of the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament–were also representative of the living and the dead as Elijah was taken alive into heaven by the chariot of fire and Moses died on Mt. Nebo just outside the Promised Land.)

Although seen by the apostles on Mt. Tabor, Moses is more commonly associated with Mt. Sinai. The famous monastery of St. Catherine (a treasure trove of manuscripts and icons) marks the place on Mt. Sinai where Moses is said to have encountered God–his own face shining more brightly than the sun afterwards–and Moses gazes out at the congregation in the monastery church from the Transfiguration mosaic behind the altar-table; the church on Mt. Sinai is dedicated to the Transfiguration, underscoring Moses’ connections with both Sinai and Tabor.

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria about 381–384. She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Old Testament, Moses received the Ten Commandments.

The monastery was built by order of Emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565), enclosing the Chapel of the Burning Bush (also known as “Saint Helen’s Chapel”) ordered to be built by Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, at the site where Moses is supposed to have seen the burning bush. The living bush on the grounds is purportedly the one seen by Moses. The place where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments is further up the mountain, behind the monastery.

The library at the monastery preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library The large icon collection begins with a few dating to the 5th-6th centuries; these icons are unique as the monastery was untouched by Byzantine iconoclasm, and never sacked.

A view of St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai
Apse mosaic of the Transfiguration from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mt. Sinai, AD 565–6.