Exodus 32:2

Hebrew Bible

2 The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from within a bush. He looked, and the bush was ablaze with fire, but it was not being consumed! 3 So Moses thought, “I will turn aside to see this amazing sight. Why does the bush not burn up?” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him from within the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”

4 Ezra 14:2

2 Esdras
Pseudepigrapha

1 On the third day I was sitting under an oak-tree, 2 when a voice came to me from a bush, saying, ‘Ezra, Ezra!’ 3 ‘Here I am, Lord’, I answered, and rose to my feet. The voice went on: ‘I revealed myself in the bush, and spoke to Moses, when my people Israel was in slavery in Egypt, and sent him to lead my people out of Egypt. 4 I brought him up on to Mount Sinai, and kept him with me for many days.

 Notes and References

"... it is fascinating that there actually was an ancient tradition about Ezra and the Torah of Moses. The tradition says that the original scroll of the Torah (and other books of the Bible) was burned up in the fire that destroyed the Temple in 587 B.C. but that Ezra was able to restore it by a revelation. This tradition is preserved in a work called the Fourth Book of Ezra. This book is not part of the Bible. It is rather part of the collection known as the Pseudepigrapha, which are works written by Christians and Jews between 200 B.C. and 200 A. D. The Fourth Book of Ezra comes from around 100 A. D. In it, God speaks to Ezra from a bush ... Ezra then recites the lost texts for forty days. Not to overstate the importance of this relatively late text, the point of this is simply that already in early times Ezra was associated with the production of the sacred text ..."

Friedman, Richard Elliott Who Wrote the Bible? (pp. 224-225) Harper San Francisco, 1997

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