Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.
Exodus 3:1-15, NRSVue
Exodus 3:1-15 is such a familiar passage that we use it in different ways. It is a call narrative, one we often reach for on vocation exploration days as an example of what a call looks like. It is also one of the passages liberation theologians return to again and again, since it presents God as one who hears the cry of the oppressed and sides with the oppressed. And it is traditionally held to be the passage in which the name YHWH is first introduced to Moses. Each of these readings has something real to offer, and each has shaped how generations of readers, myself included, first learned to approach this text.
But when I come back to this passage now, after many years of reading it and teaching it, I find that it is asking something else of me this time. What draws me to Exodus 3 this time is not call, or liberation, or the giving of the name, though all three remain true. It is a refusal hidden inside the giving of that name, a refusal that runs through the whole chapter.
Names carry weight. They tell us where someone comes from, who claims them, and who has tried to erase them. When Moses stands before the burning bush and asks God for a name, he is really asking for something every empire wants, namely a god who can be defined, summoned, and put to work. What he receives instead is a refusal, and it is this refusal that forms the political heart of Exodus 3:1-15.
It is a story about who controls the terms on which the divine can be known and used. That refusal shows itself in five signs across the chapter, and I want to take them up one after another.
Firstly, Moses is in no position of strength when this happens. He is tending the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, described as “a priest of Midian,” having fled Egypt years earlier after killing a man (Exodus 3:1). He is an exile on a land that is not his own, standing at Horeb, called here “the mountain of God,” a place belonging to the religious memory of the nomadic Midianites, nomadic tribes descended from Abraham through Keturah who ranged the deserts east of the Gulf of Aqaba, before it belonged to Israel’s.
This detail matters more than it first appears. Biblical scholars such as Joseph Blenkinsopp, Donald B. Redford, and others have argued that the divine name may have roots outside Israel, among the Kenite and Midianite peoples of the southern wilderness, the very world from which Jethro comes, a claim that finds some support in Egyptian inscriptions naming a nomadic people as “the land of the Shasu of Yhw. The inscriptions are found in topographical lists at the temple of Amun at Soleb, from the reign of Amenhotep III, and at Amarah West, from the reign of Ramesses II.
The theory remains debated, but whoever decides which piece of religious knowledge counts as origin, and whose counts as mere background, is already making a decision about power.
The most important revelation in the Hebrew Bible does not happen in a palace or a temple. It happens at the edge of things, to a man with no standing, on ground that belonged first to someone else.
The second sign is the fire. It appears before God has said a word, and it makes its own political statement simply by how it behaves, for it burns without consuming anything. In a world where fire mostly meant conquest, here is a fire that only illuminates.
Moses is told to remove his sandals because the ground has become holy, not because a priest consecrated it, and not because any institution had claimed it. Holiness has appeared in a wilderness that Pharaoh’s Egypt would never have thought worth a glance. It does not wait for permission from the centres of power. It shows up instead at the edges, among people and places that official structures have already ignored.
The third sign is the cry. It comes in the declaration that grounds everything else in the chapter. God says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry… I know their sufferings” (Exodus 3:7). Every political order decides whose suffering counts as urgent and whose is treated as ordinary. Egypt’s economy depended on treating the pain of enslaved people as background noise rather than as a moral emergency. The three verbs used here–to see, to hear, and to know–refuse that arrangement before a single chain has been broken.
Exodus 3:9 names the shape of the problem more precisely. The Hebrew word used for oppression is לַחַץ (lachatz), a term that describes crushing weight applied from above, the language of a system rather than of isolated cruelty. Exodus 1 has already shown us that system in bureaucratic detail, with its taskmasters, its quotas, and its forced labour, administered with the flat efficiency of a state that has made exploitation routine.
A serious theology of the poor must name causes, not just feelings. Exodus 3 already does this. It does not aim at scattered unkindness. It aims at a whole system of power. This raises another question, about method. Whose experience counts as real evidence when we read scripture, and whose gets set aside as merely personal? Exodus 3 answers this long before any modern reader thinks to ask it. The cry of an enslaved people is not a side detail here. It is the very reason the whole revelation happens.
The fourth sign, and perhaps the clearest one, is the name itself. Moses asks for one directly and is refused one that can be owned. In the ancient world, to know a deity’s name was to hold influence over that deity. Every royal court kept priests whose function depended on this logic, namely that if one performed the correct rite and invoked the correct name, the god would act as required.
Power has always wanted a god small enough to hold in its hand, and this is not merely an ancient problem. Leaders still reach for divine backing whenever they need their decisions to appear inevitable, whether through scripture, ritual, or the simple repetition of the claim that God is on their side.
Something similar appears far beyond the biblical world, and I think of it often because it names the same mechanism with unusual clarity. The Purusha Sukta, a hymn in the Rig Veda (one of the Hindu scriptures) describes the four-fold caste order as emerging from the body of a cosmic being at the moment of his own sacrifice, with the priestly class said to come from his head and the labouring class from his feet. Such a hierarchy written into the very body of the divine no longer needs a political argument in its favour. It only needs to be believed, and for centuries in India, in large part, it was.
This is the same move the burning bush refuses. Where Exodus 3 gives a name that cannot be settled into a fixed shape, a hymn like this fixes a social order into the body of the divine itself, so that hierarchy stops being a human arrangement open to question and becomes a cosmic fact to be accepted.
The answer God gives resists exactly this logic. “I AM WHO I AM,” or, closer to the rhythm of the Hebrew, “I will be what I will be” (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew here, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh), employs the first person imperfect of the verb “to be,” a form that does not point to a fixed state but to something unfolding, still in motion. Its refusal to resolve into a static formula is itself the theological point. The sentence folds back on itself instead of settling into something Pharaoh, or any king after him, could grasp and use. A god who can be fixed and defined can also be captured, and a captured god can always be made to bless whatever the powerful had already intended to do.
Yet this same freedom is held together with something concrete. The divine name given a moment later is anchored in specific relationships, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:15). A God who cannot be captured by any single political project is, at the same time, faithful to a particular history of struggle. A God owned by the powerful would quickly cease to be reliable to the people that power was crushing.
History did not honour this refusal for very long. Empires that needed divine backing for their own projects have repeatedly simplified this name until it says only what the powerful already wanted to hear. I think often of how this God became reattached, over centuries, to the centres of colonial power rather than to the people those empires were crushing, through the very teachings that shaped how missionaries came to understand land and belonging. This history is not only a European one. Christian Mission schools in many parts of the world carried this same divine name into villages alongside new surnames and new languages, and too often preached a god who resembled the landlord more than the God who once refused to be named at the bush. Converts were taught to distrust their own names, ancestors, and ways of knowing the sacred, all in the name of a God whose original revelation was itself a refusal to be owned.
The fifth sign is the descent. In Exodus 3:8, God says, “I have come down to deliver them.” The Hebrew verb here, יָרַד (yarad), meaning to descend, breaks the usual pattern of ancient religion, in which the gods live above while people climb toward them. Here, by contrast, God moves downward, toward the bottom of the social order, to stand beside people with no army and no voice in Pharaoh’s court. A God whose identity is built around this kind of descent cannot, without contradiction, become the property of whoever is comfortable at the top. Institutions that claim this God’s blessing while remaining distant from those at the bottom are misreading their own scripture.
This text was not written to make anyone comfortable, and it asks a plain question. Is the god most at home in our own institutions still recognisable as the God who refused Pharaoh’s kind of name, who heard a cry the empire had filed away as noise, and who came down instead of remaining above?
לַחַץ (lachatz), that crushing weight named in Exodus 3:9, has not disappeared from the world. It has simply changed its address, moving from Pharaoh’s brickyards into immigration systems, labour markets, and caste hierarchies that operate with the same bureaucratic calm that Exodus 1 describes. To name it clearly is itself a theological act, not merely a political one.
The bush is still burning, and the name is still refusing to sit still. It was not handed to Moses so that empires could feel confirmed in whatever they had already decided to do. It was given so that no Pharaoh, no colonial administrator, no comfortable congregation, could ever fully own the God who hears the cry of the crushed and who chooses, every time, to come down.
We recognise here that God is not the end of the matter but rather the beginning of an obligation. If this God keeps moving toward the bottom of every social order, then every reader and every institution that still speaks this name faces one plain question that will not go away. Are we willing to go and stand where this God already is?
