BURNING BUSH, THE. A phenomenon mentioned in the Old Testament (Exodus iii. 2-4). The vision Is said to have been seen by Moses while he was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law. " And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush : and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.' " Verse 5 continues : " And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said Moses, Moses.' And be said, 'Here am I.' " The word used for bush here, seneh, seems to occur again in Deuteronomy xxxiii. 16, where Je hovah is referred to as " He that dwelt in the bush," shOkeni sench. This would suggest that Jehovah, like the deities of other primitive folk, was sometimes thought of as making his abode in trees. But Renan was no doubt right in thinking that the original reading in Deuteronomy was shokeni sinai, " he who dwells in Sinai." There is no reason to doubt that the Hebrews
regarded fire as being sometimes a manifestation of the divine presence, or that they believed certain trees to be the abodes of deities. But this particular story need not be based upon such beliefs (cp., however, Encycl. Bibl.). Nor is it necessary to think, with Robertson Smith (R.S.), that " the original seat of a conception like the burning bush, which must have its physical basis in electrical phenomena, must probably be sought in the clear dry air of the desert or of lofty mountains." The story describes the kind of subjective vision which a prophet may well have seen. The seeing C. God C. is a designation used by anthropologists for a deity depicted in the MSS. of the Mayan Indians of Central America. Since in one place he is repre sented as surrounded by a nimbus of rays, and in the Codex Tro-cortesianus is encircled by planetary signs, he would seem to have been a deity of astronomic significance; but his identification is very uncertain.