Moses in Midian: The Burning Bush

The theophany of the burning bush belongs to an era more than three millenia removed from our own. To what degree can one really hope to understand the nature and quality of such an experience from a psychological viewpoint? Perhaps we do not know under what conditions of a different social order and religious climate capacities for experiences can be evoked that lie dormant and unused in our lives today.

To present the Biblical theophanies as hallucinatory (1) is to describe rather than to explain. Yet perhaps that is the best we can do. We are aware that the creative process is a complex one, elusive to analytic categorizing. A profound religious experience such as a theophany involves a high degree of creativity of a kind that is particularly mysterious to us.

According to the biblical narrative, Moses fled from Egypt to escape the wrath of Pharaoh after striking down an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating a Hebrew slave. The significance of this episode for Moses, together with an analytic view of his early life in Egypt is dealt with in a previous study (11).

Moses finds refuge among the Midianites, a Bedouin people whose homeland lay across the Sinai Peninsula, along the northeastern shores of the Gulf of Akaba.

It is in his humble and peaceful role as a shepherd, guarding the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro, that Moses has his first mystic experience, the theophany of the burning bush. The groundwork for this moment had been laid. When Moses arrived in Midian, he was dressed as an Egyptian, referred to as such by the daughters of Jethro. In the desert, he casts aside this garb and returns to the life of his nomadic ancestors. He accepts the basic responsibilities of adulthood—marriage, paternity, and work. And now the hour of challenge comes. The man and the task were to be brought together. This “call from God” was indeed a psychological inevitability for Moses. It was the coming to fruition of his intrapsychic struggle in Egypt, his flight from the land, an