Hearing voices in Hebrew scripture

God appears frequently as a conversation partner in the Hebrew scriptures that form the Christian Old Testament, especially in the earlier texts. In the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) conversation between God and the Patriarchs, and between God and Moses, is generally a very direct affair and is narrated much as any other conversation between two people. God is not usually reported as being visibly present,¹ and the gravity of divine speech is of an altogether higher order of significance than human speech, but the literary presentation is nonetheless very much that of regular conversation. Later, the divine voice is conveyed mainly via the prophets and is a much more indirect affair. In other cases, messages from God are conveyed by an angel, or within a dream or vision. In Proverbs it is the

“voice” of wisdom personified that is heard by those who are wise. In vari-ous places within the Psalms the voice of God interjects, and in some places (e.g. Psalm 50) there is extended divine discourse. In Psalm 115 Yahweh is contrasted with idols which do not speak.²

Voices other than the voice of God are also encountered in various places, notably the voice of a serpent in Genesis 3, a donkey in Numbers 22, and the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel, conjured by a medium in 1 Samuel 28. In each case, as with angelic messengers elsewhere, there is a clearly identified speaker present within the narrative. In Genesis, Adam and Eve both converse with the serpent, just as they do with God, albeit the ser-pent serves as a counterpoint to the divine voice, encouraging disobedience to what God has previously said. In the case of the donkey in Numbers, we might consider that it is really God who is speaking (indirectly), as the nar-rator tells us “the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey” (verse 28). And when Samuel is summoned up by the medium, he speaks, as he did in life, as a prophet on behalf of God. In each case, the voice functions as a narrative device to move the plot forward and, indirectly, to make clear the truth of what God has previously said.

All of these texts are more than 2,000 years old, and were written accord-ing to literary and cultural conventions which are far removed from those of the modern world. Might it yet be reasonable to refer to the direct and indirect speech of God within these texts as a voice heard – and to those

who heard it as “voice hearers”? Some people clearly think so. For example, Gerda de Bruijn, a psychologist, writing in one of the seminal texts of the Hearing Voices movement, says without qualification: “The originators of the Western monotheistic religions (Moses, Jesus and Mohammed) all heard voices not apparent to others” (de Bruijn, 1993, p.30).

Similarly, Richard Bentall (2004, p.349) writes that “it is certainly true that hallucinatory experiences have been recorded since biblical times”. A recent journal article by a distinguished group of researchers, asserts that

“unusual sensory experiences” have been spiritually foundational through-out the world – and the first example given is “Moses and his burning bush”

(Laroi et al., 2014, p.S214). Simon McCarthy Jones, in his monograph work Hearing Voices, writes: “The inclusion of a range of voice hearing experi-ences in the books of the Old Testament firmly established hearing voices as a potentially divine experience, and validated it as a way that God could contact humanity” (Jones, 2012, p.22). In a footnote, McCarthy-Jones indicates that he is “not concerned here with the veracity of these stories, but rather the influence they had on how people understood hearing voices”. The clear assumption is that, questions of “veracity” aside, these stories may be understood as examples of “hearing voices”.³ But are they?

First, it is important to note that in Hebrew scripture God is said to have spoken even before the first human beings appeared on earth. In the first Genesis creation narrative, it is through God’s speech that things are brought into being. Thereafter, the word of God is understood as powerful and effective in sustaining creation and in bringing about the divine pur-pose in diverse ways, many of which do not involve human hearing at all.⁴ This ancient Near Eastern understanding of the power of the voice of God was not exclusive to Israel. Psalm 29 is a hymn in praise of “the voice of the Lord”, which may well have its origins as a Phoenician hymn to Baal, modified for the worship of Yahweh.⁵ Within this psalm there is both a recognition of the power of the voice of God in nature and also, at least in the version in the Hebrew psalter, a praise of God for his power in bringing victory in war. The voice of God, as understood in Hebrew scripture, is thus much more than words heard in human hearing.

Second, there would appear to be within Hebrew scripture a genre or form of text that we might describe as theophanic (Kuntz, 1967). A simple definition of theophany might be that it is “a temporal manifestation of the deity to man involving visible and audible elements that signal God’s real presence”.⁶ Kuntz points out that, within the Hebrew tradition, hearing seems to have been a particularly important component of the theophany.⁷ It is thus not adequate to define a theophany merely as the “appearance”

of a divinity.⁸ However, it would also seem that the hearing of God alone does not constitute a theophany. This is not a perceptual matter, or an asser-tion that a theophany has to be multimodal in some way, so much as an observation on the way in which Kuntz identifies the theophany as a form within the canon of Hebrew scripture. Thus he outlines a core of six

formal elements of the theophanic genre⁹ within which the “hieros logos”, or special word, of the deity is but one.¹⁰ Whilst he notes that these do not all need to be present, it is also clear that there are places where the divine voice is heard and is not, on its own, considered to be theophanic.¹¹ This may reflect his primary concern with form criticism of the text. He does not explore theophany as a psychological phenomenon, but only as a textual form. Nonetheless, we are left with theophany as a key genre, or form, within Hebrew scripture, within which the “hearing of the voice” of God is central but not necessarily definitive.

If Hebrew scripture has anything at all to do with the hearing of voices, it is thus immediately clear that it is going to be much more complex than a simple extrapolation from “the Lord said to Moses” to an assumption that Moses heard voices. In order to test the nature of the relationship further, we will need to look a little more closely at some specific examples. It will not be pos-sible to study all of the “voices” of Hebrew scripture in detail here, but some earlier and later examples will be considered. Attention will also be given to the nature of prophecy as a means by which a voice heard – the voice of God – becomes significant as a voice proclaimed.

Genesis

According to Genesis, direct conversations were had with God by Adam and Eve, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, and Jacob. In the story of Adam and Eve, a dialogue is also had with the serpent. In Genesis 16 and 21, Hagar has conversations with an angel. In Genesis 18, Abraham and Sarah receive three visitors who are often said to be angels, although in fact the text refers to them as men, and the encounter is referred to as being with God. In Chapter 19, it is angels who rescue Lot and his family from Sodom.

Amongst these narratives, is an account of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”¹²

Abraham proceeds in obedience to the divine command, but then – at the very last minute – an angel intervenes:

Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said,

“Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”¹³

Abraham, again obedient to the voice, offers a ram in sacrifice instead of his son, and then he hears the angelic voice again:

By myself I have sworn, says the LORD: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.¹⁴ What are we to make of such conversations? According to George Graham, Abraham was clearly delusional, and the voices hallucinatory.¹⁵ But do these texts tell us anything about the psychological experiences of historical characters?

Genesis probably has its origins in a number of sources, drawing on oral traditions which may have been quite ancient, which were then written down and gathered together by later authors or redactors. Recent scholarship has suggested that the composition of Genesis may thus have taken place as late as the 6th century bce (Dozeman, 2016). For all its theological significance, which is enormous for both Judaism and Christianity, it is now clear that its historical and scientific significance (which have both been the subjects of considerable attention) require critical and careful consideration. Whether or not any of the characters portrayed in this book were historical figures is open to considerable debate. Even if they were, the purposes of the unknown author(s) in writing about them were far removed from our present purpose.

Genesis adopts a narrative mode of portrayal, within which voices – divine, angelic, animal, and human – play a significant part. However, the narration of a voice is not the same thing as the hearing of a voice – as the first creation narrative, and the later divine soliloquies¹⁶ in Genesis clearly show.

This means that we should not jump to naïve or overly literal conclusions about the relationship between the hearing of divine or angelic voices in these texts and the phenomenon of voice hearing as we encounter it today. The authors of Genesis were not phenomenologists or psychologists. Indeed, the whole notion of phenomenology is anachronistic to a 6th-/5th-century understanding of human experience.¹⁷

Genesis does, however, introduce the notion of a God who speaks, and the significance of this (for Judaism and Christianity, perhaps also for Islam) is huge. Theologically, it portrays a God in intimate relationship with the natural order that he has created, and particularly with peo-ple in it. The world as portrayed in Genesis is not some kind of deistic desert, from which God keeps himself far removed, but rather a living – if now also flawed – paradise within which God reveals himself and thus is encountered by human beings. This is a world within which the voice of God may be heard. The implications of this have echoed down the centuries since and have been important to all three of the world’s major monotheistic traditions.

Moses

As Walter Moberly¹⁸ has suggested, Moses is presented in Deuteronomy as the prophet par excellence. Moses occupies a hugely significant place in the biblical account of the early origins of the worship of Yahweh.¹⁹ There is no historical evidence either to confirm or refute the assertion that an histori-cal character identifiable as Moses ever existed, but it would appear that he might be located in or around the 13th century bce.²⁰

Early in Exodus, a story of a theophany experienced by Moses provides the basis for an account of his calling as a prophet.

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush,

“Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt.”

(Exodus 3:1–8) This theophany is almost immediately followed (in verses 7ff.) by a story of the calling of Moses as a prophet and leader of the Hebrew people.²¹ The pattern that is established is thus one of the interrelatedness of an experience of the presence of God and the response that such an experience elicits.²²

The perceptual phenomenon that initially attracts Moses’ attention is that of the fire. This in itself was not an unusual experience in a hot desert where dry vegetation could easily ignite. Rather, it attracted attention because it continued to burn when it should have burned itself out. This does not appear to be presented as a visionary experience, so much as a normal per-ception (albeit perhaps of a miraculous event), in a mundane context, which nonetheless has important symbolic significance.²³ Moses, his attention thus engaged, then finds himself in an encounter with the God who speaks. God identifies himself as holy, as his God (the God of his father and of the patri-archs), and as concerned with the suffering of his people.

This encounter marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of Moses, and a turning point in the story of the oppressed people of Israel. From this point on in the narrative, dialogue between God and Moses is a frequent occurrence. Describing Moses’ regular meetings with God in the “tent of meeting”, the narrator of Exodus says: “Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (33:11).

Not all of the subsequent encounters between Moses and God are as dramatic as the one described in Chapter 3. Much later (33:18–34:8) Moses experiences another theophany in which it becomes clear that his more usual exchanges with God were of a different (much more mundane) order.

However, the narrator of Deuteronomy draws attention to Moses as being unique among the prophets for the directness of his communication with God: “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (34:10).

The indirect voice: dreams, angels, diviners, prophets, and seers

Somewhere after the end of Genesis and before the beginning of the era marked by Judges, things change. Whilst Moses clearly belongs to the earlier era of directly hearing the voice of God (and Joshua is represented as following him in this tradition, albeit to perhaps a lesser degree), the later prophets seem to have a different experience. Before turning to the later pro-phetic tradition, it is important to give some further consideration to this transition, and to various experiences of more indirectly hearing the voice of God.

Westermann²⁴ identifies a number of transitional forms, beginning with a key initial transition point in the Genesis narrative in the story of Joseph, to whom God reveals himself in dreams, but not in direct speech.

A further transitional form is that of the angelic messenger. Between the times of the Patriarchs and the Judges, Westermann says, angels appear to proclaim a message from God to a recipient, but then disappear again.

Thus, for example, angels appear and speak to Gideon (Judges 6–8) and to Manoah and his wife (Judges 13). In fact, at the beginning of Judges, an angel apparently addresses “all the Israelites” (2:1–5). During the later prophetic era – another transition point according to Westermann – God’s revelations are also delivered indirectly – but by means of human mes-sengers, the prophets. After this era, he argues, both direct and indirect revelations by God are understood to have ceased. It is now the inherited text which is revelatory.

Westermann clearly draws attention to an important point. There do seem to be transitions. Given the lack of narrative clarity as to exactly what the experiences of Moses and the later prophets were supposed to have been, I don’t think we can say that these were actually transitions in the mode of revelation, or the phenomenology of voices. However, there do appear to be literary transitions, and perhaps theological transitions, in the ways in which God’s voice is understood to be heard. We might debate exactly where these transition points fall, historically or canoni-cally. For example, Wieseltier locates the key transition point – from direct revelation to inherited text and tradition – much earlier than the later prophetic era:

The rabbis in the midrash comment: “The voice makes its way to Moses and all of Israel does not hear it.” Moses, of course, reported what he heard. It was precisely when the report of the voice did the work of the voice that tradition was born.

(Wieseltier, 1987, p.37) Whether or not Westermann’s exact account of things is accepted, it is clear that there is an important transition from the direct speech, reported as being heard by the patriarchs and by Moses, to the more indirect forms of communication found in the later biblical literature.

Richard Friedman has an altogether more radical account of this transi-tion. For Friedman, “God disappears in the Bible”:

Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible . . . the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less. Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease. In the last portions of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known apparent ways of the earlier books.

(Friedman, 1995, p.7) The wider argument that Friedman constructs is beyond the scope of the present work, and it is interesting to note that he refers to absence of God

(Friedman, 1995, p.7) The wider argument that Friedman constructs is beyond the scope of the present work, and it is interesting to note that he refers to absence of God