The Hiddenness of God by Michael C. Rea

Author:Michael C. Rea [Rea, Michael C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

2.

What happened at Mount Sinai when Moses and the people of Israel received the Ten Commandments from God? Taking our cues from Cecil B. DeMille, we might think it was something like this: Moses spoke aloud to God, perhaps throwing himself against the side of the mount and asking, with great dramatic passion, “What have I left undone?” Then God promptly appeared, perhaps as a flame in the sky, and replied audibly, enunciating in words that anybody could hear each of the Ten Commandments, perhaps simultaneously burning them with a flaming finger into the stones that would eventually become the two tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain. But this is hardly an inevitable interpretation of the Sinai narratives.

Consider, for example, Exodus 19–20, which begins its Sinai narrative with Israel entering the wilderness and camping at the foot of the mountain, and culminates in God delivering the Ten Commandments and other laws to Moses and the people of Israel. These chapters depict God as saying quite a bit. God gives Moses instructions about how to prepare himself and the people of Israel for Moses’ ascent up the mountain; God tells Moses who is allowed to come up the mountain with him and who is not; God speaks the words of the Ten Commandments; and so on.

The chapters also describe various noises accompanying the voice of God—thunder, the sound of a trumpet, the rumblings of an earthquake. It is altogether natural to read the text as implying that all of these sounds, including the voice of God, were publicly available, so that anybody present and possessed of properly functioning sense organs would have heard exactly what the text says that Moses heard. Accordingly, it is also natural to assume that the text reports the truth about the Sinai events only if God spoke actual sentences with a publicly audible voice. In fact, however, this very natural assumption is incorrect; and there is theological utility in maintaining an open mind about how to interpret this and other biblical texts that report encounters like this with God.

Practitioners of the method of historical biblical criticism generally rely on what we might call a uniformity assumption: God, if there is a God, and the world operated in biblical times in pretty much the same way that they operate now. We all rely on some version of this assumption, with different versions being determined by different ways of unpacking the vague “pretty much.” When we read historical narratives, we do not typically wonder what the laws of nature were at the time when the narrated events were said to occur; we do not typically assume that miraculous events happened any more routinely than we think they do today; and we typically hold fixed most of our assumptions about how human beings across different cultures are likely to think and behave. Importantly, the strength and consequences of our uniformity assumption will be informed by our background theological commitments. Among the most relevant background commitments will be

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