In todays’ reading, Moses encounters the Lord in a burning bush that is not consumed. The Lord identifies himself by saying “I am the God of your father…” In the phrase “God of your father,” we find what Albrecht Alt identified as one of the distinctive elements of the faith of Ancient Israel. There is a certain level of complexity to this issue that I do not want to go into here, but to get a good summary you might check out this link to a limited preview of the text In Search of God in Google Books (scroll down a little). What I mainly wanted to point out in relation to Alt’s work is that having a “God of the fathers (i.e. ancestors)” was a distinctive element of Israel’s faith because many of the deities in surrounding areas of the Ancient Near East were gods of “places.” In other words, these gods were tied to particular sites, such as Assyria, Babylon, Persia, etc.

Having a “God of fathers” rather than a god of a particular place is one of the elements of the faith of Ancient Israel that helped it to endure.  If you have a god of a particular place and that place is destroyed, then what of your god?   Or, in the case of Israel, if you have a god tied to a particular place and you are exiled from your place, what of your god?  Do you then worship the gods of the place to which you have been taken? Do you bow down before Marduk?  Yet when you have a “God of fathers” that god can be worshiped as long as the lineage of the ancestors is carried on.  One can imagine what comfort Ancient Israelites who had been taken away in the Babylonian Exile might have taken when hearing texts like the one we encounter this morning: “I am the God of your father…”

If interested, you might be very fortunate to find an inexpensive used copy of Alt’s work: