Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 76:1 (NA 2025)
Article: The Lambent Presence: The Shining Face Of God In The Old Testament
Author: David J. Reimer

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The Lambent Presence: The Shining Face Of God In The Old Testament¹

David J. Reimer

Honorary Senior Lecturer
School of Divinity, University of St Andrews
[email protected]

Abstract

Included among the lines of the Priestly Blessing is the prayer that ‘the Lord [would] cause his face to shine upon you’ (Numbers 6:25), at least as it is often translated. This prayer has a small number of echoes in the rest of the Hebrew Bible with sufficient similarity to suggest something like a formulaic usage, and enough difference to raise questions about the meaning of the saying in each of its contexts. Beyond this, how should this anthropomorphism be understood? What does it mean for God’s ‘face’ to ‘shine’: is this a simple, transparent metaphor? Or does its elucidation require some deeper investigation? This exploration of the ‘shining face’ of the Deity further attempts to make a contribution to a (Christian) theology of ‘divine light’, for which previous accounts have tended to ignore this potentially illuminating set of texts.

1. Introduction1

When Samuel Balentine’s monograph The Hidden God appeared in 1983, he introduced it as a study that would bring some balance to a discourse which had been heavily skewed (he asserted) towards speaking of divine presence.2 It

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was based on his 1979 Oxford DPhil thesis, one of relatively few written under the supervision of James Barr. Just as it was being completed, Samuel Terrien’s study of The Elusive Presence appeared,3 and Balentine was able to refer to it in the subsequent monograph.

Between them, the ‘two Samuels’ were a harbinger of a new phase of discourse. In short order, in a single series published by Fortress Press, the following titles appeared as volumes 12, 13, and 14: in 1984, James Crenshaw’s A Whirlpool of Torment, also in 1984 Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror, and in 1985, Terence Fretheim’s The Suffering of God.4 The trajectory was a powerful one, and continues to the present: the bibliography of ‘hidden God’ items is a very long one. It includes the recent article by Olga Y. Fabrikant-Burke titled ‘Rethinking Divine Hiddenness in the Hebrew Bible’, which will provide some help later in this essay,5 although my purpose is not to analyse or probe mo...