O Lord and Ruler of the House of Israel

First, the Latin text and the English translation:

O Adonai

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

These antiphons address Christ with seven magnificent Messianic titles, based on the Old Testament prophecies and [attributes] of Christ. The Church recalls the variety of the ills of man before the coming of the Redeemer…Before the coming of God in the flesh, we were ignorant, subject to eternal punishment, slaves of the Devil, shackled with our sinful habits, lost in darkness, exiled from our true country. Hence the ancient antiphons announce Jesus in turn as our Teacher, our Redeemer, our Liberator, our Guide, our Enlightener and our Saviour.

The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. Ryan and Ripperger, 1941

 The antiphons beg God with mounting impatience to come and save His people. The order of the antiphons climb climactically through our history of Redemption…In the first, O Sapientia, we take a backward flight into the recesses of eternity to address Wisdom, the Word of God. In the second, O Adonai, we have leaped from eternity to the time of Moses and the Law of Moses (about 1400 B.C.).

Jeanne Kun comments:

“Adonai” is Hebrew for “my Lord”, and was substituted by devout Jews for the name “Yahweh”, out of reverence.  With this second antiphon we progress from creation to the familiar story of God manifesting himself by name to Moses and giving his law to Israel as their way of life.  We are also reminded of the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage under pharaoh – a foreshadowing of our own redemption from sin.  The image of God’s arm outstretched in power to save his chosen people also brings to mind the later scene of Jesus with his arms outstretched for us on the cross.

The poet and composer, the Revd Malcolm Guite, has written a sequence of sonnets on the antiphons.
O Adonai begins:

Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day….

Ann Lewin, in her Come Emmanuel:

It was the Exodus that God gave as his reason for giving his people the laws that would guide their lives…God’s relationship with his people was a covenanted relationship, a relationship in which both parties pledged faithfulness to each another, that made demands on the people in return for God’s faithful care.

Our Digital Nun, at iBenedictines blog, concludes our piece with:

…Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush makes one tremble. God’s holiness flaming out from an insignificant shrub is a thought to strike awe; but the thought of not seeing it, of mistaking his presence, is more terrible still. I suspect many of us would admit that there have been times in our lives when God was there but we didn’t register his presence. We were too caught up in other things. We ignored the hand he stretched out to us….