The disappearance of god in the bible

In The Hidden Face of God (formerly The Disappearance of God in the Bible), RL Friedman points out how we find in the Old Testament a very consistent and gradual shift from God's outright familiarity and intimacy with Adam and Eve, to his distance and even absence after the exile— while at the same time, the human characters develop from childlike undifferentiation and dependence to a fully differentiated and mature humanity. It's well worth reading his treatment of these two themes through the Old Testament text, even if you skip the rest of the book.

Friedman's insight here completely accords with another theme he does not particularly discuss, but which has been noted by other commentators, in which the basic theme and plot line of the OT is the fundamental existential condition of *exile*.

Recognition of a consistent and overarching plan in what we have been accustomed to thinking a rather disparate collection of books gathered only over the course of a millennium introduces some very interesting questions about canon and composition, which Friedman mentions but of course cannot address in this work— although as i say below, i think he could have done a little more in this area than he did.

In the second part of the book, almost as though there were no more to be said on the biblical topic per se, Friedman departs from the bible narrative and discusses Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky as signal figures of the twentieth-century experience of God's absence. This discussion is interesting, but for me it was a distraction from the biblical story, which is stunning enough and mirror enough of modern experience that a discussion of the latter seems unnecessary— or at least not well integrated with the material in the first part. Couldn't he have said more about the Bible?

Moreover, his final excursus on Big Bang theory and Kabbalah struck me, as such essays invariably do, as an exercise of whistling in the dark; trying desperately to make connections where there are none, not only between physics and religion, but especially between twentieth-century God-lessness and God. It would have been a much stronger book had just meditated more deeply on God's absence as expressed in scripture, and its relevance as a description of our situation, rather than trying to fill the absence with pseudoscientific mysticism, and pseudomystical scientism. He could much more fruitfully have integrated materials on the almost cynical treatment of prophecy that we find in the Elisha story, for example, or DN Freedman's insight into the "nine commandments" (see the article under "Biblical Studies" on my website), or the similarly overarching theme of exile, to really drive his points home. But God's absence is hard to bear, and so he seems to have tried to find ways of making God come back through science and kabbalah, now that "organized religion" is effectively dead for the masses.

As I mentioned, Friedman raises interesting questions about the canon and its unity and composition. In fact he repeatedly states his working assumption about this— that essentially the documentary hypothesis he so masterfully demonstrated in his earlier book Who Wrote the Bible? is true— so that the canon came together as a result of many authors working over a long period of time. The unity of plot, theme, and narrative he was describing seemed to be in serious tension with any scenario other than that proposed by young turks such as Thomas L Thompson (whom he does mention as "too radical" to be taken seriously), who thinks of the entire canon as a "maccabean tract". But we can't blame Friedman for not having answers to questions that only recently have emerged powerfully into scholarly consciousness— partly through his own work!

Friedman has some good things to say about the New Testament experience of God incarnate, which takes place in view of the absence of God so keenly felt by the end of the OT. He is obviously a Jew working hard to be fair to a faith he does not share, and I think he pulls it off pretty well. He is neither simplistic nor dismissive, and though his insights are not strongly developed, they are certainly worth further reflection. At the very least, the near-total disappearance of God by the end of OT times is an interesting context for the appearance of the Son of Man.

I consider the first half of the book to be one of the most significant pieces of biblical theology written in some decades, not least becaue as it goes a long way toward fulfilling a great need for accessible insight into the nature of the bible. Everyone interested in what the Bible has to say, and especially anyone who hopes to teach biblical, literary, or historical subjects should read it. Which is not to say it's perfect, or even complete— but it's an unavoidable point of departure for any further discussion. I will read it again— more than once— and teach it to my students.

I will mention that if I had written the book, instead of talking about the Big Bang and Kabbalah, I would likely have written something about modern interest in buddhism as a response to the felt absence of God, and reflected on the buddhist experience of radical emptiness/openness as a modality of confronting and experiencing that emptiness. I find myself almost wanting to say that the Old Testament leads, in a way, to Buddhism— and that this direction is not abandoned, but gets a very interesting twist, in the Incarnation.