Hierophanies

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 3rd

When I think of a “burning bush” I think of this tree, at the peak of its color.

This past I week I have been revisiting a classic essay by the great religion scholar (and, honestly, style icon) Jonathan Z. Smith, trying to put some pieces together for an article that I might or might not end up writing. Early in his essay, Smith quotes another eminent religion scholar of the 20^th century, Mircea Eliade, on the subject of hierophanies. A hierophany is an appearance of the holy in the world, an interjection of the divine into profane space, and an instance of the realms of gods and people coming near to each other. It’s basically when a god shows up. (There is another term, theophany, that is specifically used when a god shows up, but here I will use the more generic term hierophany since that’s what Eliade uses). I don’t read much Eliade—and none at all since grad school—so it was interesting to encounter his voice again. He has fallen out of fashion over the years, in part because his grand claims about the universal nature of human religion and religious experience don’t work as well once they’re removed from the zeitgeist of the mid-late 20^th century, and I don’t have a lot of occasion to read his work. His writing can border on the mystical, and I’ve found that if you’re not buying what he’s selling, it can be hard to find much in it to hang on to. Eliade seems like an all-or-nothing kind of scholar; you either go with it, or you don’t.

This particular quote that Smith was using, though, caught my attention, because of its descriptive power. I’ll reproduce the quote as Smith did, skipping the middle part, with the elisions that Smith introduced, since I don’t have access at the moment to the full text:

“We must get used to the idea of recognizing hierophanies absolutely everywhere….Indeed we cannot be sure that there is anything…that has not at some time in human history been somewhere transformed into a hierophany…it is quite certain that anything man (sic) has ever handled, come into contact with or loved can become a hierophany….It is unlikely that there is any animal or any important species of plant in the world that has never had a place in religion….But somewhere, at a given time, each human society chose for itself a certain number of things, animals, plants, gestures, and so on and turned them into hierophanies; and, as this has been going on for tens of thousands of years of religious life, it seems improbable that there remains anything that has not at some time been so transfigured.” ¹

I thought about this quote as I read the Exodus text from this week’s lectionary readings. Exodus 3:1-15 is the story of Moses approaching the burning bush—the bush that was ablaze but never consumed—and encountering God there. This is a hierophany (and a theophany)—perhaps the hierophany that stands as an exemplar for all the rest, within and beyond the biblical text—and it’s an interesting test case for Eliade’s claims. Eliade is pointing out that because of how humans look for meaning and the presence of the divine in the world, we tend to notice gods everywhere, and we experience their presence all over the place. This is so true, Eliade is saying, that we have probably used up all the things in the service of holiness, at this point. If you think of something—a rock, a hue of the sky, the way a tree grows, ground squirrels, a phase of the moon—chances are good that someone, sometime, has seen God (or gods) in it. Everything that we are likely to encounter in the world has already been layered, many times over, with human descriptions of divine power and attributions of divine presence.

Certainly, the burning bush was extraordinary. Trees have probably been understood as hierophanies more than most things in the world; we have all heard of trees that are considered sacred or holy, or that are thought of as places where sacred and holy things might happen. But a bush, on fire, but never burned up—that’s unusual. The text says that Moses had “led his flock beyond the wilderness,” to “the mountain of God,” which is where he found the tree. So there was already an edge of the unknown and the unknowable to the story; Moses’ wanderings had led him, and the reader, beyond the borders of familiarity, and once he was past those borders, he came upon this bush. At the bush, or in it, or from it, Moses encountered a presence. The identity of that presence is both visible and hidden; the person inhabiting it is both revealed and concealed.

The identity of the presence is visible and revealed to us, the 21^st century reader, because the presence is attended by all the markers of the God of Israel. There’s a recitation of genealogy, in which God cites Moses’ ancestors, about whom the reader has already been informed. There’s a reference to the captivity in Egypt, which we know will go on to become the central narrative in the drama of God and God’s people, as told in the Hebrew Bible. We can surmise that this is the God of Israel, and not some impostor, because this God speaks like the God of Israel speaks, and cares about the same things the God of Israel cares about, and claims Israel as a special concern. And we know how this story ends, with the exodus from Egypt and the entry into Canaan, so we are prepared, when we encounter this burning bush, to see it as a hierophany, as an appearance of God.

But the identity of the presence is also a little bit concealed. It’s hidden on purpose; the text is working hard to obscure it. When Moses asks the name of the God who is speaking to him, the presence in the burning bush becomes slippery and dodgy. “I am who I am,” the presence said, as if that ought to settle the matter. Tell them, “I am has sent me to you.”

There have been oceans of ink spilled over this response, from games of grammatical Twister that try to contort the Hebrew into something intelligible, to meditations on the use of the present tense in translations, to mystical reflections on the way God can never be understandable to humans. I’ve heard more than a few sermons that have tried to squeeze some profound message out of God’s answer. But I think that’s futile in a sense, because it seems clear to me that at the burning bush, Moses has encountered a being who does not want to be fully known, even in the midst of a hierophany. There is a mystery to this God. God’s shifty response to Moses’ request for a name, and the very act of showing up as a burning bush in the first place, display a penchant for mystery. This is a deity with a limited interest in self-disclosure.

The name that God gave at the burning bush, and the mystery that accompanied it, have been guarded carefully by Jewish tradition through the centuries. To this day, the name is not pronounced by most devout Jews, and often it is not even written, so as to prevent accidental pronunciations. Sometimes a blank space is left in the text where the name ought to appear; other times, a substitute is put in, and the name is never “pointed,” or written with vowels attached, to help ward off accidental pronunciation. The name is known by a few different replacements that people say instead of pronouncing the name. Some say “the Lord,” or Adonai in Hebrew. Scholars sometimes say “the tetragrammaton,” from the Greek meaning “four letters,” after the way the name is written in Hebrew, YHWH. (By the way, the name “Jehovah” is not its own name, but rather a mispronunciation of YHWH that has gained popularity since the 16^th century, but it probably does not represent any ancient pronunciation). In many of the scholarly circles I run in, we simply say “the name” or “ha-shem” (which is Hebrew for “the name”), instead of pronouncing it, out of respect for the Jewish scholars among us. That’s how powerful this name is that God gives to Moses at the burning bush, and how persistent the atmosphere of mystery is that surrounded it.

If a hierophany is a moment that mediates divine presence in the regular world, then the God of Israel has often been described as showing up in this world hesitantly or partially. Stories about appearances of God in the Hebrew Bible are often ambiguous and hard to pin down. Think of Jacob’s wrestling, for example…was his opponent God, an angel, or a man? Or, think of the “sheer silence” of 1 Kings 19, where God’s presence becomes known by the absence of noise and action, instead of by a presence. Later in his life, Moses meets God’s presence on Horeb (or Sinai), but we don’t get a lot of detail about it, other than that it changes Moses’ appearance. The God described in the Hebrew Bible sometimes can seem to be a bit shy, and hesitant to be pinned down. (Whether Jesus represents a kind of hierophany or theophany, as many Christians might claim, is another question, perhaps one we shall take up some Advent season).

If we return to Eliade’s observation that humans often see the sacred or the divine everywhere, then we might not be inclined to see this story of Moses encountering God in the burning bush as all that special. After all, we see gods everywhere, in everything. But I think that Eliade was probably making the opposite point, which is not that the sheer number of hierophanies makes them each mundane, but rather that the repetition and layering of hierophanies has made the whole world holy, or at least potentially holy, and made humans into something like a truffle pig, but for holiness. Even as this story of God’s appearance took place in a specific place and form, Eliade might say, the accumulated witness of thousands of years of human religious life might lead us to see the sacred everywhere, and be especially industrious at seeking it out. That’s a perspective borne out by the Hebrew Bible, I think; the God described there can just as easily be found in a wild place as in a temple, and God seems especially suited to the wilderness. Ha-shem seems to relish the tabernacle more than the temple, and the mountaintop more than the tabernacle, and on the mountaintop, God seems to be possessed of a wildness and a danger that few can encounter.

So this story of the burning bush might not be written to draw our attention to the bush itself, as a singular location of God’s presence, or even to the mountain itself, but instead it might be written to lead us beyond the limits and boundaries of where we are accustomed to look for the sacred. It might be a story about finding holiness, and finding a God who is prone to hiddenness and wildness, outside of where we had expected to find the sacred. It might be the story of a world shot through with sacred presence, where we might expect any of the things we encounter to be a window onto the holy, or even all of the things we encounter. Perhaps this story should help us understand that this burning bush was a hierophany, an interruption of the holy into the world, but that more than that, everything else is a hierophany too, or at least everything else could be. In other words, this story might not be particular but universal—not the story of the discovery of one special place or thing, but the story of how holiness shows up in the world, among the most mundane and quotidian parts of the world—a story about the human knack for finding the sacred.

1. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958, 11-12. Quoted in Smith, Jonathan Z. Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon, in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. London: University of Chicago Press, 1982 (36-52).