Category Archives: Early Church

Commandments #1-3

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A contemporary icon showing the prophet and God-seer Moses at the Burning Bush and receiving the Ten Commandments, both of which happened at Mt. Sinai.


Moses goes up into the smoke and fire and receives the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai. He has set a human barricade around the base of the mountain to insure that no “tourists” or sightseeing thrill seekers climb up the rocky heights behind him, hoping to see and hear what is intended only for Moses to see and hear. Even his brother Aaron, who goes partway up the mountain with his brother Moses, turns around and goes back to the bottom before Moses reaches his destination.

The first three or four commandments are commonly considered to describe our duty towards God; the following commandments are commonly thought to reveal our duty to our neighbors. It is these Ten altogether that the Early Church thought were eternal; the other commandments of the Old Testament—according to the Apostolic Constitutions, a 4th century Syrian handbook for how to run a parish church—says that the other Old Testament commandments were all given after the idolatry of the Golden Calf and all have to do with regulating the worship of Israel (how to worship, who can worship, what is worshipped, behavior that can get a person banned from participating in worship).

The most famous and controversial of these first three commandments is the commandment condemning idolatry. Most people think idolatry means worshipping statues but idolatry is really about letting anything be more important than God. Family, ideas, food, sex, drugs (alcohol included) can become idols if any of them are more important to us than God.

People often also think idolatry means worshipping devils and demons. St. Paul doesn’t think idolatry is about worshipping demons; he thinks idolatry is a waste of time because the “god” the statue represents doesn’t exist. According to St. Paul in First Corinthians, idolatry is the worship of a thing that isn’t real whereas worship of the true God is worshipping what really exists. That’s why he thinks it’s safe for a Christian to eat meat that was sacrificed to an idol; the meat wasn’t sacrificed to a devil but it was offered to something that doesn’t exist so it wasn’t really offered to anyone or anything.

That doesn’t mean that devils and demons don’t exist. The NYTimes had a fascinating article this weekend about the differences in religious power wielded by a Christianity that takes demonic power seriously vs. a Christianity that does not take demonic power seriously.

Moses = Burning Bushes and Building Bridges

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Moses encounters the Logos, the Word of God, at the Burning Bush in the icon of Our Lady of the Burning Bush in the upper right corner of the icon; see the detail from a contemporary icon as well.


Moses was the lynchpin between God and Israel; as the Serbian proverb goes, he was the neck that turned the head (connecting the head—God—to the body, which was Israel). His encounter at the bush, as he was tending Jethro’s flocks, becomes an image of the Incarnation as the bush that burned but was not consumed is a foreshadowing of the Virgin who gave birth to God without loss of her virginity.

According to Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!), the Hebrew word in the story that is translated into English as bush is seneh(סנה‎) which refers in particular to brambles; seneh is a biblical dis legomenon, only appearing in two places, both of which describe the burning bush. The use of seneh may be a deliberate pun on Sinai (סיני‎), a feature common in Hebrew texts. (That the burning bush is a bramble bush also associates it with the bramble bush which is an important part of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.)

At the bush, Moses is commissioned to act as God’s mouthpiece, telling Pharaoh to “Let my people go” and telling the people of Israel what God wants from them. He is commissioned to build a bridge between God and the world—both the fallen world (Egypt) and the world being redeemed and healed (Israel). This role as the bridge builder between God and the world is essentially the role of a priest; one Latin word for priest is pontifex, which is literally “bridge builder.”

Even before Aaron is ordained as priest, Moses offers sacrifices to God on behalf of Israel. Moses builds the bridge between eternity and the world by his words and by sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, it was an especially meritorious act to leave money in your will to build a public bridge that did not charge a toll across a river. Building a toll free bridge was a priestly act, uniting two sides of the river as a priest unites worlds in the liturgical sacrifice and preaching. (Without a bridge, people might have to travel several miles—hours—out of their way to find a place to cross the river. A toll bridge, built by someone who wanted to make a profit on their construction investment, limited river crossing to the well-to-do; a toll free bridge was an image of Christ’s sacrifice freely available to all.)

Moses built a bridge between God and Israel. Israel, the priestly people commissioned at Mt. Sinai, built a bridge between God and the world. The Word-made-flesh, who spoke to Moses at the bush, built the ultimate bridge that brought together everything he was not with everything that he is. The Church, the Body of the Word-made-flesh, continues that ministry of bridge building.

Jethro and Moses … and Christ

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Bodelian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 2708, Folio 39V
A good man? Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, is a devoted family man, well respected for his advice on governing and his benevolent leadership of the tribes of Midian. This early 13th-century illustration from the Bible moralisée depicts Jethro (seated under the arch on the right) rewarding Moses (left) for rescuing his daughters (six of whom are pictured in the center) and their flocks from rival shepherds.



Jethro, to most people, was the not-so-bright son of Jed and Granny on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” How many realize that Jethro was the name of Moses’ father-in-law? Jethro was “priest and prince of Midian,” the area where Moses encountered the Burning Bush.

Jethro comes to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, before the giving of the Ten Commandments, because he is bringing his daughter–Moses’ wife–back to him. Although the text does not tell us this earlier, she evidently took their children and went to her father for safekeeping during Moses’ confrontation with Pharoah; when Moses tells Jethro everything the Lord did for the people, including the plagues, this is all news to Jethro. If his daughter had seen any of this, she would have told him; evidently, she left Moses in Egypt before the plagues began. In thanksgiving for the deliverance of the people, Jethro offers a large sacrifice and invites all the clan leaders to the feast that follows.

The text tells us that Jethro is priest-and-prince. We already knew that he was wealthy because of the description of his large flocks when Moses first meets him. Whether Jethro was a wealthy herdsman who was therefore acknowledged as “prince” or was the prince and therefore was wealthy, we don’t know. But the linkage of royalty and priesthood only occurs one other time in the Old Testament: the priest-king Melchizedek who blesses Abraham and is seen as a “type” of Christ by the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Medieval rabbis were eager to avoid the embarrassment of Moses having a pagan priest-prince as a father-in-law and so they began to suggest that Jethro was circumcised after he heard the recitation of God’s mighty acts of deliverance–after he heard what became the Passover haggadah, in effect. This made Jethro, like Melchizedek, a legitimate priest before Aaron and his sons were made a legitimate priesthood. This makes Jethro, like Melchizedek, a foreshadowing of Christ–the Son of David who is both priest and king on the Cross. Jethro, however, was not the focus of the typology in the Epistle to the Hebrews because he did not evidently live forever, like Melchizedek did; Jethro was an imperfect type of Christ, the ultimate king-priest who is eternal.

Nevertheless, this makes for fascinating speculation about Moses–raised as a prince of Egypt– and his immediate family as Middle Eastern royalty and their connection to priesthood in both Moses’ father-in-law (Jethro) and his brother (Aaron).