The burning bush in a resurrection dispute

Traditions: Jewish Torah; Christian Gospel Motif: God’s identification with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Connection verdict: Explicit citation of Exodus by Jesus in Mark Article status: Expanded Date: 2026-10-25

Summary

Exodus 3 has God identify the divine presence to Moses by the ancestors. Mark 12 cites the bush passage in an argument about resurrection.

Read the two scenes

The burning bush is often remembered for its fire or the divine name. In Exodus, the ancestral identification also grounds a promise to respond to Israel’s affliction. In Mark, that phrase is read under pressure from a hypothetical marriage puzzle posed by opponents of resurrection. Jesus does not retell Moses’s entire mission. He selects one aspect of the encounter and reasons from the ongoing relationship between God and the named ancestors. Readers can recognize the literary dependence while disagreeing about whether the inference follows from the Torah’s original aim.

What connects—and what does not

Exodus concerns Moses’s commission to confront Pharaoh; Mark answers a Sadducean challenge about the dead.

Mark’s named bush passage makes the citation certain; the inference about life beyond death is a later interpretive argument.

Why read them side by side?

This is a clear case of an older story becoming a resource for a new theological question, not an accidental shared image.

Sources and reading notes

• Exodus 3:1–15 — Moses at the bush and divine self-identification
• Mark 12:18–27 — Burning-bush wording in a resurrection dispute

Research limit

A named parallel can establish literary reuse or related tradition; a general resemblance alone cannot prove borrowing. Linked editions and translations vary. Where a source is identified as secondary orientation, the comparison does not claim direct close reading of that tradition’s primary text.