RT Article
T1 Rethinking Divine Hiddenness in the Hebrew Bible: The Hidden God as the Hostile God in Psalm 88
JF Harvard theological review
VO 114
IS 2
SP 159
OP 181
A1 Fabrikant-Burke, Olga
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 2021
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1770766006
AB Divine hiddenness in the Hebrew Bible is widely construed as the conceptual equivalent to divine absence. This article challenges this influential account in light of Psalm 88 - where the hidden God is hostilely present, not absent - and reevaluates divine hiddenness. Divine hiddenness is not conterminous with divine absence. Rather, with its roots in the ancient Near Eastern idea of the royal and cultic audience, the meaning of "hide the face" (סתר + פנים) may be construed as a refusal of an audience with the divine king YHWH. Building on this insight, I argue that divine hiddenness possesses a petitionary logic and develop a distinction between the experiential and petitionary inaccessibility of salvific divine presence. Divine absence and hostile divine presence denote the former, while divine hiddenness the latter. I probe the relationships between divine hiddenness, divine absence, and hostile divine presence, concluding that the absent or hostilely present God is not ipso facto hidden.
K1 Hebrew Bible
K1 Psalm 88
K1 divine absence
K1 Divine Hiddenness
K1 Divine Presence
K1 hostile divine presence
K1 Wrath
DO 10.1017/S0017816021000122