I Am that I Am

Hubert Maurer (1738-1818): Moses before the burning bush

Sébastien Bourdon: The Burning Bush, 17th century

"I Am the I Am", "I Am that I Am" or "I Am who I Am" (Hebrew: אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה ehyeh asher ehyeh) is the word by which Yahweh-Elohim made himself known to Moses on Mount Horeb in the burning bush (Hebrew: הַסְּנֶה בֹּעֵר ha-səneh bo'ēr) as the I Am (Greek: ἐγώ εἰμί ego eimi), as the I-Being, the bringer of the I, who in his true essence is the Christ, the World-I, who descends from the solar sphere to the earth. Yahweh, the lunar Elohim, is, according to Rudolf Steiner, the lunar reflection of the cosmic Christ and at the same time represents the higher community consciousness of the seven Elohim through whom the creative Word, that is, the Christ, works.

„1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. 3 And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” 4 When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. 7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.” 13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. 16 Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, “I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt, 17 and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.”’ 18 And they will listen to your voice, and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.’ 19 But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. 20 So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it; after that he will let you go. 21 And I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and when you go, you shall not go empty, 22 but each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and any woman who lives in her house, for silver and gold jewelry, and for clothing. You shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. So you shall plunder the Egyptians.”“

– Exodus 3:1–22

The decisive 14th verse reads in the original Hebrew:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶל־ מֹשֶׁ֔ה אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה וַיֹּ֗אמֶר כֹּ֤ה תֹאמַר֙ לִבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה שְׁלָחַ֥נִי אֲלֵיכֶֽם׃
"wajomär Elohim äl Mosheh eh'jeh asher eh'jeh wajomär koh to'mar liv'ne jisrael eh'jeh se·la·ha·ni a le'kem" [1]
"Said the Elohim to Moses: "I am the I Am". Said: To the sons of Israel say: The "I Am" has sent me to you."

אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה eh'yeh is the Imperfect of the first person singular of הֲוָיָה hayah, "to be". Since biblical Hebrew does not grammatically distinguish the tenses, Eh'yeh can be equally interpreted as "I am", "I was" and "I will be". אֲשֶׁ֣ר asher is a relative pronoun whose meaning depends on the immediate context and can be translated here as "the", "that"", "who", "which", "where".

„So we look back at the Old Testament and ask ourselves : Who do the ancient Hebrew people worship in reality? Who is the God of the ancient Hebrew people? - The members of the Hebrew mysteries knew: they worshipped the Christ; they saw the Christ in him who spoke the word: "Say to my people: I am the I Am". - But even if all this were not known, the fact that within our human cycle the God in the fire announces Himself would be authoritative enough for one who looks into the deep mysteries of nature to recognise that the Deity of the burning bush and the Deity who announced Himself on Sinai are the same Deity who comes down from spiritual heights to accomplish the Mystery of Golgotha by descending into the human body. For there is a mysterious connection between the fire that is kindled outside by the elements of nature and that which pulsates as heat through our blood. It has often been emphasised in our spiritual science that the human being is a microcosm which confronts the great world, the macrocosm. Therefore, if we observe in the right way, what is in the human being in terms of inner processes must correspond to outer processes in the universe. For every inner process we must be able to find the corresponding outer process. We have to enter deep shafts of spiritual science if we want to understand the meaning of it. Here we touch the edge of a deep mystery, a great truth, that truth which answers the question: What is it in the great outer world that corresponds to the mystery of the origin of human thought in us?

Man is the only truly thinking being on our earth. Through his thoughts, man experiences a world that leads him beyond this earth. In the form in which thoughts ignite in man, no other earthly being experiences thoughts. What ignites the thought in us, what takes place in us when the simplest or most glorious thought flashes through us? Two things work together in us when we let thoughts pass through our soul: our astral body and our I. The physical expression for our I is the blood; the physical expression for our astral body is our nervous system, what we call the life in our nervous system. And our thoughts would never flash through our soul if there were not an interaction between the I and the astral body, which finds its expression in the interaction between the blood and the nervous system. It will seem strange to a human science of the future if present-day science seeks the origin of thought in the nervous system alone. The origin of thought is not in the nerves alone. Only in the living interaction between the blood and the nervous system can we see the process that gives rise to thought.

When our blood, our inner fire, and our nervous system, our inner air, work together in this way, then the thought flashes through the soul. And the emergence of the thought within the soul corresponds in the cosmos to rolling thunder. When the fire of lightning ignites in the air masses, when fire and air play together and produce thunder, then this is the same macrocosmic event in the great world, to which corresponds the process when the fire of the blood and the play of the nervous system discharge themselves in the inner thunder, which, however, sounds softly and calmly and unperceivably for the outer world in thought. What the lightning in the clouds is to us the warmth of our blood, and the air outside with all the elements it contains in the universe, corresponds to that which pervades our nervous system. And just as lightning, in its interplay with the elements, produces thunder, so the interplay of blood and nerves produces the thought that jolts the soul. We look out into the world that surrounds us: We see the approaching lightning in the formations of the air and hear the discharging, rolling thunder. And then we look into our souls and feel the inner warmth pulsating in our blood and feel the life running through our nervous system - then we feel the thought jerking through us and say: Both are one.

Truly and really it is! For in us we think, and when the thunder rolls in the sky, it is not merely a physical-material phenomenon. It is only so for materialistic mythology. But for him who sees the spiritual beings weaving and sweeping through material existence, it is truth and reality when man looks up and sees the lightning and hears the thunder and says to himself: Now the God in the fire is thinking as he must announce himself to us. This is the invisible God who weaves and surges through the universe, who has his heat in the lightning and his nerves in the air and his thoughts in the rolling thunder. He spoke to Moses in the burning bush and at Sinai in the fire of lightning.

The same elements of fire and air that are in the macrocosm are in man, in the microcosm, blood and nerves; and as in the macrocosm are lightning and thunder, so in man are thoughts. And the God whom Moses saw and heard in the burning bush, who spoke to him in the lightning fire at Sinai, appears as Christ in the blood of Jesus of Nazareth. In the human body of Jesus of Nazareth appears the Christ who descends into human form. By thinking like a human being in the human body, he works as the great model of human development into the future.

Thus the two poles of human development meet: the macrocosmic God on Sinai, who announces himself in thunder and lightning fire, and the same God microcosmically, embodied in the man of Palestine.109“ (Lit.:GA 96ff)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Das Prinzip der spirituellen Ökonomie im Zusammenhang mit Wiederverkörperungsfragen, GA 109 (2000), ISBN 3-7274-1090-6 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.