Moses and the Burning Bush: Leadership and Potentiality in the Bible

Abstract

This chapter discusses Freud’s depiction of Moses as an absolute monarch in Moses and Monotheism. The argument is that the portrayal of Moses as a tyrannical ruler essentially obscures a much more nuanced representation of Moses in the bible, as introduced in the scene of the Burning Bush, where Moses was not domineering nor demanding, but rather, suffered under the imperious demands of God. The analysis of the interaction of Moses with God borrows several concepts from Agamben’s theory of potentiality to argue that in contrast to the despotic Moses of Freud, the biblical Moses symbolizes the human struggle for impotentiality and freedom.