The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  When Moses recounts the events at Mount Sinai in the book of Deuteronomy, he stresses what the Exodus account did not, that at the great revelation at Sinai the Israelites actually saw nothing:

  You [Israelites] came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain was burning bright to the very midst of heaven—darkness, cloud, and deep shadow. And the LORD spoke to you from the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words but you saw no shape—nothing but a voice. (Deut 4:11–12)

  From the heavens He caused you [the people of Israel] to hear His voice, in order to discipline you.* On earth He made you see His great fire; and from the midst of that fire you heard His words. (Deut 4:36)

  God was in heaven. He called down to the Israelites and they could hear His voice, and when they came closer they could also see a great fire burning on top of the mountain. The fire appears to have been some sort of earthly outpost from which God’s words were heard, but the Israelites did not see anything of God Himself during this whole revelation.

  The Still, Small Voice

  Ultimately, all biblical texts are the product of scribes and scribal culture,28 and they come down to us through chains of editors and rewriters, so it is often difficult to attach a particular passage to even an approximate date. With this word of caution, however, it is worth considering what is certainly one important landmark that belongs somewhere in the gradual change we are tracing. It comes in an encounter with God that took place just after a scene examined above, when the prophet Elijah challenged the prophets of Ba‘al on Mount Carmel. Immediately after, the Bible relates that Elijah was threatened with death by Ba‘al’s champion, Queen Jezebel (1 Kgs 19:1–2), so the prophet wisely fled southward to Horeb/Sinai, where he went into a cave to spend the night. The next day, God ordered Elijah to come out:

  He [God] said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then a great strong wind split the mountains and shattered the crags before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind—a shaking [or “earthquake”], but the LORD was not in the shaking. After the shaking—a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire: the sound of the thinnest stillness. When Elijah heard it, he covered his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kgs 19:11–13)

  The oxymoron translated above as “the sound of the thinnest silence” was rendered in the King James Version of the Bible as “a still, small voice,” and as such it has enjoyed a rich afterlife in the English language. Endless sermons have been preached about it, usually taking the phrase to refer to a person’s own inner promptings, “the voice of conscience.” A nice thought, but this doesn’t fit the context at all. Rather, scholars connect this narrative to the previous encounter between Elijah and the prophets of Ba‘al. Ba‘al, after all, is the god of storm clouds and the fertilizing rain that they bring—in short, a god connected with natural phenomena such as those that characterize other nature deities the world over, gods of fertility and the harvest and of the great natural cycles that they control. But this biblical narrative is at pains to assert the very opposite, that the LORD, YHWH, does not inhabit these natural manifestations of divine power. The wind passes by, but He is not in the wind; the earth rumbles as if an earthquake is taking place, but God is not in the rumbling either, nor in the fire that appears next (perhaps intended to mean lightning). And interestingly, Elijah is not fooled by any of these outward manifestations of divine power. It is only when he hears this sound-that-is-barely-a-sound that Elijah knows that the LORD has come, and he covers his face and comes out of the cave; then God begins to address him.

  We are probably still far from those explicit professions of monotheism seen earlier, “There is no God but Me” and the like. Nevertheless, a certain trend is observable in the different sorts of divine encounters described so far: from a God with a human-sized body that can be seen, to one whose body can be seen only obliquely, glimpsed from behind; to one who cannot be seen at all, but only heard,* apparently because God resides in far-off heaven; along with a God whose voice is not the booming, almost unbearably loud sound that accompanies natural phenomena like thunder and earthquakes, but something altogether un- natural, a sound so thin it can hardly be heard at all (but this, our last passage seems to be saying, is what the voice of God really sounds like—it is not in natural phenomena, but separate from them).

  It should be said again that this apparent trend is in no sense a straight-line progression. The history of divine encounters as reported in the Bible is not one step forward and then the next, but includes lateral jumps, idiosyncratic depictions that become traditional for a time, followed by later imitations and slight modifications, then fresh starts and various subsequent resumptions and reiterations. It would not be wrong to think of all these biblical representations as models, perhaps comparable to those of modern-day scientists in their attempts to explain the invisible in terms of things seen, leading to the arcane world of string theory and the like.** In biblical Israel too, there were different models, different ways of depicting what truly occurred by trying to connect the world of the senses with what is merely sensed.

  To continue this search for the proper model: the God in the first chapter of Genesis is also a disembodied voice (similar in this respect to the God at Sinai as described in Deuteronomy). He issues commands that are mysteriously carried out. “Let there be light,” He says, and then “there was light.” Who made the light? We are not told. Its creation seems to have just been ordered into existence, and the result is subsequently inspected by God Himself, who, the Bible reports, “was pleased,”29 as if observing from the sidelines. The same pattern is repeated for the rest of creation, the earth and the sky, the sun and the moon and stars, and so forth—God is never depicted, never has a body, but just speaks, after which things happen. This description would fit to some extent with the deity who inhabits the priestly sanctuary described above (that is, the desert tabernacle or mishkan, and the Jerusalem temple that followed in its wake). God is said to “meet with” select human beings inside this sanctuary; in fact, He is inside the closed-off Holy of Holies within the sanctuary, in the special place where He is said to “dwell”—namely, above the wings of the cherubim stretched out above the Holy Ark. This flimsy perch does not seem suited to any sort of real body;30 once again, God’s presence seems to consist of some sort of disembodied voice, a spiritual presence that has no physical manifestation. His being exists in, or perhaps as, an empty space.

  The Three Omni’s

  These conflicting models for representing God’s being are all to be found in the Hebrew Bible. But for all their differences, a definite process of abstraction is observable. If monolatry or monotheism was a cause of this process or its result is hard to say. But one thing is clear: the national deity of a tiny people settled in the highlands of Canaan might quite conceivably appear in the form of a man-sized divine being who has just stepped over from the other side of the curtain. But a deity who rules over entire nations and peoples (even with the help of underlings) could hardly be thought to exist in a body the size of an ordinary human being. He must be as huge as the book of Isaiah says, His throne itself consisting of the whole sky, and for whom the whole earth is just a convenient footstool (Isa 66:1).31 And after all,

  Who has measured the oceans in the hollow of his hand [as God has], or marked off the skies with a yardstick?

  Or put the earth’s soil in his bushel, weighed the mountains on a hand-scale and the hills in a balance? . . .

  The nations themselves are [to Him] a drop from the bucket, they weigh as much as the dust on a scale. (Isa 40:12, 15)

  Could such a huge being even be said to have a body at all?

  What happened next, the thing that was to be the most important development in the human encounter with God for later centuries and centuries, may have been anticipated within t
he Hebrew Bible, but it was not stated explicitly until the period just following the biblical period. God came to be characterized by the three omni’s: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, that is, all-powerful, all-knowing, and existing everywhere all at once. This understanding had the most profound effect on Judaism and Christianity.

  Of the three omni’s, one was really not much of an innovation at all: divine omnipotence. After all, this is how Israel’s God is consistently presented in the Bible, even if, in strictly literal terms, He is never actually defined as omnipotent. Nowhere in the Bible is God ever overcome by any other deity or even engaged in any theomachy,32 a conflict of deities such as is found in Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian mythologies.33 Despite what some scholars have identified as the recrudescence of ancient mythological motifs in the Bible,34 such as the identification of tehom (“abyss” in Gen 1:2) with the Mesopotamian sea monster Tiamat, or the crossing of the Red Sea evoking the divine conflict with the sea god Canaanite Yamm, there is nothing that challenges God’s position in the Bible as more powerful than any other divinity. He is simply “greater than all the other gods” (Exod 18:11); He “does whatever He wishes, in heaven and on earth” (Ps 135:6, 115:3). Even when human armies appear to defeat Israel, these defeats are no defeat of God, but rather manifestations of God’s use of foreign nations to punish His people. Those foreign armies are the “stick of His wrath” (Isa 10:5), which once used can be thrown away. The “problem of the stone”* may have troubled medieval philosophers, but such questions had no role in divine omnipotence in biblical times.

  But the other two omni’s are a somewhat different case. To begin with, divine omniscience and omnipresence are potentially related. A deity who is everywhere all at once also knows, thanks to his omnipresence, everything that is going on every minute of the day. (This may not be the most ethereal definition of omniscience, but it does cover at least most of what early post-biblical sources might have meant by the term.) As mentioned, neither of these omni’s is stated as such in the Hebrew Bible. There is no assertion that God is omniscient, nor that He is everywhere always, without interruption.35 True, a passage in Psalm 139 is sometimes used as evidence of the latter:

  If I could go up to the sky, there You would be; or down to Sheol, You are there as well.

  If I took up the wings of a gull to settle at the far end of the sea,

  Even there Your hand would be leading me on, holding me in its grip. (Ps 139:8–9)

  This may be read as omnipresence, but it seems to be more an answer to the question just preceding it, “Where can I go from Your spirit, or how can I get away from You?” (verse 7). In other words, try as I may to escape from You, You somehow manage to be there, no matter how far I travel. True, in this and other verses in the same psalm, the psalmist attests to the feeling of God’s overbearing presence. Yet he never quite says what he easily could have, “Where can I go from Your spirit, since You are everywhere?” Divine omnipresence is not yet a general principle. And indeed, numerous earlier biblical texts had explicitly presented God as not omnipresent. Likewise, God is never described in the Hebrew Bible as omniscient. He can penetrate people’s insides to discover their secret thoughts, but this is different from saying He automatically knows everything at all times.

  Little by little, however, the presumption that God is both everywhere and all-knowing began to be articulated as such,36 since if God is everywhere, then He obviously sees everything that is going on. In 1 Enoch, an apocryphal work whose earliest parts go back to the third or fourth century BCE, the angels say to God “You see all things, and there is nothing that can be hidden from you” (1 En 9:5). Indeed,

  “You know all things before they happen, and You see these things and You permit them, yet You do not tell us [angels] what we ought to do to them with regard to these things” (1 En 9:11)

  Similarly, the Jewish sage Ben Sira* says of the godless man:

  He does not realize that the eyes of the LORD are ten thousand times brighter than the sun;

  They see all the things a man does, observing the things that are most hidden.

  Before anything exists, it is known to Him, and He sees what will be after everything ceases. (Sir 23:9–20; cf. 16:17)

  The opening line above is rather close to those passages seen earlier (Zech 4:10, 2 Chron 16:9) that claim that God’s eyes “range throughout the whole earth.” But Ben Sira goes significantly farther, asserting that God simply knows everything, and knows it even before it exists; correspondingly, He also knows what will happen after it ceases to be.

  Ben Sira lived more than a century after the Greek conquest of Judea, when Greek ideas and institutions had already begun to leave their mark on Jewish religious thought, and an all-knowing, omnipresent deity was certainly a notion that resonated with Stoic philosophy.37 It should not be surprising, then, that other Jewish texts from a slightly later period repeat the same claim:

  For the ways of men are known by Him always, and He knows the secrets of the heart before they happen. ([Apocryphal] Psalms of Solomon 14:8)

  Similarly, from the “Testament of Naphtali,” Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs:

  For there is no creature and there is no thought that the Lord does not know, since He created every person in His image. (T. Naph. 2:6)

  As mentioned, divine omniscience went in tandem with omnipresence. The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who lived in a Greek-speaking city and wrote his commentaries on the Torah and other treatises in mellifluous Greek, espoused a sweeping picture of divine omnipresence:

  God is everywhere, because He has stretched out His powers through earth and water, air and heaven, and left no part of the universe empty of His presence.38

  A peculiarity in the Old Greek (Septuagint) version of the book of Exodus provided Philo with what he considered biblical proof of the doctrine of divine omnipresence. A certain verse, Exod 17:6, was rendered into Greek as having God say to Moses, “Here I am standing in front of you there, on the rock in Horeb.”* From this apparent contradiction Philo concluded that “He [God] who is here, is also there and elsewhere and everywhere, since He has filled everything through and through and left nothing empty of Himself.”39

  But such sweeping claims that God is everywhere and knows everything sometimes ran into trouble with the Bible itself. True, numerous passages referred to God’s capacity to penetrate the human mind and find out anything—but this is not the same as just automatically, effortlessly, knowing. And besides, there were a number of biblical narratives that seemed patently to deny that God knows all. One instance was the brief biblical tale of Cain and Abel, whereby Cain kills his brother Abel in a fit of rage:

  Cain said to his brother Abel, [“Let us go out to the field”].** And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to Me from the ground! [As of] now, cursed are you from the ground that opened its mouth to swallow your brother’s blood at your hands. If you till this ground, it will no longer yield its riches to you. You will become a nomad, a wanderer on the earth.” (Gen 4:8–12)

  God asks Cain a straightforward question, “Where is your brother Abel?” Apparently God asks because He doesn’t know, and at the time that these events were written down, there was no harm in this (any more than there was in His question to Adam in Gen 3:9, “Where are you?”).40 Then, as God draws closer to the scene of the murder, He discovers that Cain’s answer—“I don’t know”—was a deception: He hears Abel’s blood crying out from the ground and immediately sentences Cain to a life of wandering.

  If we fast-forward from the time in which this narrative was first written down to the time of the Bible’s ancient interpreters, the discomfort of the latter with it is palpable. For example, the Book of Jubilees (probably composed at the start of t
he second century BCE) recounts the incident, but makes no mention of God’s question “Where is your brother Abel?” Moreover, while Jubilees does say that Abel’s blood cried out, in its retelling the blood does not cry out to God (“to Me” as in the biblical text), but somewhat more vaguely “to the heavens.” In short, in the Jubilees version God did not need to ask Cain where Abel was or even to hear Abel’s blood crying out in order to know what happened. He just knew.

  Two and a half centuries after Jubilees, Philo of Alexandria again takes divine omniscience for granted. He asks:

  Why does He who knows everything ask the brother-murderer, “Where is Abel your brother?” He wishes that the man himself should confess of his own free will . . . since he who kills through necessity will confess . . . but he who sins of his own free will will deny it. (Questions and Answers on Genesis 1:68)

  A generation later, the Jewish historian Josephus recounts the story of Cain and Abel in some detail—and with a few significant additions:

  Abel, the younger one, was concerned with justice, and believing that God was present at every action that he himself undertook, he made a practice of virtue . . . [Later on,] Cain, incensed at God’s preference for Abel, slew his brother and hid his corpse, since he thought that the matter might thus remain a secret. But God, aware of the deed, came to Cain and asked him where his brother had gone, since He had not seen him for many days, although previously He had always seen him together with Cain. Cain was thus cast into difficulty and, having nothing to reply to God, at first said that he was likewise surprised at not seeing his brother. But then, exasperated by God’s persistent, inquisitive meddling, he finally said that he was not his brother’s baby-sitter or body-guard responsible for whatever happened to him. At this, God accused Cain of being his brother’s murderer. (Jewish Antiquities 1:55–57)