What Does Exodus 3:6 Mean?

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.

God's first self-identification at the burning bush is not a new name but a link to an old history. He identifies himself through the chain of covenant relationships: your father, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. The God who is about to reveal his name and mission is not a new deity appearing for the first time; he is the God who has been in active covenant relationship with Israel's ancestors for generations. The Exodus begins in Genesis: the God of the burning bush is the same God who walked with Abraham in Canaan.

Moses hides his face when God identifies himself: the physical response of concealment communicates appropriate awe before the Holy. In the ancient mind, to see the face of God was to court death; the holy in its fullness is not compatible with the casual approach of the mortal human. Moses' hiding is not fear in the ordinary sense but the right response to an overwhelming proximity of the divine. The appropriate human response to theophany is the instinctive recoiling of the creature before its Creator.

Jesus cites this verse in his debate with the Sadducees about resurrection (Mark 12:26-27): "And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him: 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?

He is not God of the dead, but of the living." Jesus' argument turns on the present tense: at the time of Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are already long dead. Yet God calls himself their God in the present tense. The covenant relationship God maintains with them is ongoing, not terminated by death. The burning bush becomes, in Jesus' argument, the ground of the resurrection.