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EXODUS 3
MOSES AND THE BURNING BUSH
Preface
This text has three subjects:
- The struggle to find the real name of God.
- ¨The call of Moses.
- The prelude to the Exodus of Egypt.
The accumulation of various names of god in this text is extraordinary in the Old Testament. It pointed to an uncertainty, how to be understood the real name of the one true God Yahweh. Furthermore the burning thornbush has many tensions, ruptures and repetitions, which shows an intensive editing of this text (1). Ideas are more or less elegantly fit into each other. Originally, it concerned a story of a cultic place, a sacred tree, from which the composition of Moses' election arised.
The author of the burning thornbush is unknown and today referred to as "Yahwist". "The Yahwist" means one or more authors who formed especially the books of Genesis and Exodus. For some commentators the Yahwist lived during the time of King Salomo, but other scientists have shown in the last century, that the ideas of Yahwist are similar to the ideas of the Greek philosophers in the 6th century B.C. Therefore the narratives of Yahwist belong in the 6th century B.C.
The Yahwist adopted the prophetic and historical thoughts of a long tradition of Israel and Judaea and formed the given text to his own theological conviction or devises new figures or stories, which he preached to the believers in the exile or after-exile time.
The Yahwist 's great endavour to create the idea of an ideal patriarchy from the given tradition, strike me most (3). He adopts thereby the polemics of departed prophets und historians against adultery and disobedience against God, and forms a morally exalted patriarchal narratives.
* * *
The bible and especially the texts written by the Yahwist were produced
during the big era of the 1st Millennium B.C. (4). According to Jean Gebser,
in this period the human awareness mutated from the mythical to the mental
consciousness (5). Mircea Eliade saw the condition to such a mutation in the
distinctive sun cult. The sun cult created the tightly organized government
and the disciplined thinking (6). The mental consciousness, or it is also
called rational consciousness, has its roots in the Archetyp of the Great
Father (7), who has dominated the thougths and feelings of people since the
1st Millennium B.C. In the christian tradition of Europe the Great Father in
the figure of God Father or Jesus Christ represents the over-ego (8). Horst
E. Richter showed (9), how the man during the mediaeval had been afraid of
God, but since the age of Enlightenment he has copied more and more the
given divine ability. He has become like God once the bothering conqueror
and the ruler of mater-ial.
Text and Design: Esther Keller-Stocker, Horgen-Zürich
(Switzerland)
Last correction on 04.02.2010.
I'm looking forward to your comments and your suggestion!
Contact me at esther@estherkeller.ch
