Being Is Said in Many Ways

Sophia, yesterday we found five jobs for “to be”, and the voice at the bush used only one of them: existence. But I still don’t understand that one. When God said “I am”, what kind of “is” was it?

Then let us read the passage again, slowly, as a text to take apart. First the forms of the verb itself, then the philosophy. I have brought a friend for the second part. His name is Aristotle.

I counted. be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been. Eight different words. Every other verb has four or five.

It is the most irregular verb in English, and in Greek too: eimi, esti, ēn, esomai. English built it from three different old verbs, like a house made from three ruins: is, was and be.

So I ask “Does the bush be burning?”

Never. be makes its own questions and negatives, with no do: Is it burning? It isn’t burning. Were you there? I wasn’t. The only exception is the imperative: Don’t be afraid. Do be careful.

“There is a bush on the mountain.” The bush doesn’t do anything. It is just there.

Exactly: there is / there are announce that something exists, in the singular or the plural, before we say anything else about it: There was a flame. There were sheep.

Now, Aristotle. He noticed that when we say that something is, we can mean ten different kinds of thing. He called them categories, and each answers a different question. Let us test them on the burning bush.

Ten? I thought we had five uses already.

Substance, the answer to “what is it?”: Moses is a man. It is a bush. A noun after is.

Quantity, “how much, how big?”: The bush is three cubits tall. Quality, “what kind?”: The flame is bright. An adjective.

Relation: Aaron is Moses’s brother. The mountain is higher than the hill. So that’s where comparatives live.

Very good, Marcos. Relation is every “than”, every “brother of”, every “double”.

Place, “where?”: Moses is on the mountain. Time, “when?”: The vision was at midday. Prepositional phrases.

Position, how a thing is placed: Moses is kneeling. The sheep are lying down. And having, or state: Moses is barefoot, because God told him to take off his sandals.

And the last two are the most beautiful, because the bush is made of them. Action, “what is it doing?”: The bush is burning. That is be + -ing, the continuous. Affection, “what is being done to it?”: The bush is not consumed. That is be + past participle, the passive.

Burning, but not burned up. It’s doing the action, but not suffering it. That’s the whole miracle, in two categories.

And now try God’s answer. “I am the One who is.” What category? Not substance, a kind of thing. Not quality, not quantity, not place, not time. He doesn’t say what he is like, or where, or what he is doing. He just is.

Aristotle would agree that there is a puzzle here. He said that being itself is not a category, because it runs through all of them. Philo, you are saying that your scriptures put God there: not inside any category, but above them all.

Yes.

Then you’ve understood the verb better than most philosophers. Next, we meet some other verbs that behave just like “be”: they don’t do anything at all, they only link a subject to what we say about it.