Did God really say?
When reading through the Hebrew scriptures (what we call the “Old Testament”) it is common to encounter phrases like “and God said” or “and the Lord told them.” For instance, when David consults God in 1 Samuel 30 with the question, “Should I chase after this band of raiders? Will I catch them?”—referring to a group of Amalekites who had recently attacked his settlement at Ziklag while he and his men were away, burned it to the ground, and took captive all their wives and children—the story says, “And the Lord told him, ‘Yes, go after them. You will surely recover everything that was taken from you!”[1]
This sort of framing is so common and presented so matter-of-factly in the Old Testament that the casual reader just assumes that God spoke in an audible voice that was as clear to figures like David as mine would be to you if we were speaking face-to-face.
But there is compelling evidence in the scriptures to suggest that was not the case.
In the story I just mentioned, for instance, David consults the Lord only after requesting that Abiathar the priest bring him what was called the sacred ephod, a garment that was supposed to be worn by the high priest when he ministered before the Lord in the tabernacle, something that by the time of the events recorded in 1 Samuel 30 hadn’t happened in a while.
The point is that it seems David “discerned” God’s permission to attack the Amalekites after consulting and interpreting a sacred object, not necessarily because he heard the audible voice of God, though it makes perfect sense the story would be recorded that way. If you believed God was giving you permission to attack your enemies you aren’t going to say, “I stared at a special robe for an hour and eventually had this internal sense that God was ok with me killing people.”
You’re going to say, “And the Lord said…”
And what David did seems to have been common practice.
At pretty much the same time David was trying to figure out if God was cool with him taking vengeance against the Amalekites, King Saul was trying to figure out what God would have him do about an army of Philistines that had drawn up battle lines against him. Only in Saul’s case, God didn’t answer.
The story says, “He asked the Lord what he should do, but the Lord refused to answer him, either by dreams or by sacred lots or by the prophets.”[2]
It seems there were commonly accepted ways in which people “heard from the Lord.” Dreams were common. People had dreams, assumed that God was speaking to them through those dreams, and then interpreted those dreams to “discern” what God was saying. The most notable example of this is probably the story of Joseph.
But keep in mind that lots of people failed to interpret Pharoah’s dream before they reached out to Joseph, suggesting that interpreting dreams was not exactly straightforward. There was plenty of room for error.
Or as in Saul’s case, just not having any dreams to interpret.
Another option was “sacred lots.” This probably refers to what are identified in the Old Testament as the “Urim and Thummim,” mysterious, sacred objects that were kept inside or attached to the high priest’s breastplate (hoshen). The priest would “consult” these objects as a way of discerning truth or God’s will.[3]
This is probably not an entirely fair comparison, but that feels a little like rolling dice. At the risk of sounding sacrilegious and/or elitist and superior, it appears that to “hear God’s voice” it was common for people to talk to rocks they believed were special.
But I’m sure the results were always accurate and trustworthy.
If dreams and lots didn’t work, they had prophets. And while you might like to think this one was ironclad, there’s plenty of internal evidence to suggest it was not. First, lots of people claimed to be prophets. There wasn’t something like “prophet college” you had to graduate from or a “prophet exam” people had to pass to certify they heard from God. Anyone could claim the role and thus anyone could emerge from a little quiet time claiming to have heard from God.
Sound familiar?
Second, many of these so-called “prophets” served in official court roles as advisors to kings, kings like Saul. But I’m sure none of them ever felt the pressure to tell their respective kings what they wanted to hear and pass it off as “the word of the Lord.” That never happens.
Oh wait…check out the story of Ahab in 1 Kings 22.
So many people in the Old Testament self-identified as prophets, claiming to hear the voice of God and the authority to speak on behalf of God, that the prophet Jeremiah had to outlaw prophetic claims. He forbade anyone from using the phrase “I have a prophecy from the Lord” because, people were…get this…”using it to give authority to their own ideas, turning upside down the words of our God, the living God, the Lord of Heaven’s armies.”[4]
I can’t believe people would do that.
When the Old Testament uses phrases like “God said” or “the Lord told them,” many modern Bible readers have been trained by a certain kind of Biblicism to assume people back then heard the clear, audible, unambiguous voice of God and then just did what they were told. That’s why these stories are in the Bible, right? Because God spoke to people?
But if many of these stories depict something that actually happened in historic space and time, if you could hop in a time machine and travel back to when the event took place, I’m pretty sure that’s not what you would witness. I don’t think you’d hear God’s audible voice say to David, “Yes, go after them. You will surely recover everything that was taken from you!” I think you’d observe David engage in some kind of “discernment process” that involved the use of what he considered to be a sacred object and emerge from that process with the conviction that God had authorized him to wage war.
Since people still do this sort of thing today…all the time…that shouldn’t sound to you like an entirely far-fetched idea.
But I understand that to a Bible reader trained on a certain kind of Biblicism, the suggestion that just because the Bible claims that someone heard from God does not mean he actually did, could feel…unsettling. The kneejerk reaction is to think, “Well then can I trust anything the Bible says?”
Again, for a person trained on a certain kind of Biblicism, I get that reaction.
The simple shift is this: instead of feeling like you have to believe what the Bible describes for no other reason than because the Bible describes it, you only have to accept; 1) that the characters in the story or the author of the story believed it and wrote it down as such as a consequence; and 2) Because God can only communicate with people in language they can understand, to advance the plot of redemption, God let the story ride as documented.
In other words, God doesn’t swoop in and correct everyone every time they say or do something they believe came from God when it didn’t. Perhaps we wish God would. Maybe then we wouldn’t have so much trauma from our last church.
But that’s simply not how it works. Like us, everyone in the Old Testament was engaged in acts of interpretation, trying to discern God’s voice and will, sometimes making use of signs and objects that today most people would consider outrageously irresponsible.
I’m sure there were times they got it right, just as we do. I’m sure there were also times they got it wrong, just as we do. Just because they wrote it down in a book they considered divinely inspired and useful does not mean everything they wrote communicated perfectly accurate, timeless truths about God, any more than is true every time a pastor speaks from a Sunday pulpit (or Tuesday blog post).
[1] 1 Samuel 30:8
[2] 1 Samuel 28:6
[3] See for example 1 Samuel 14:36-42 when King Saul consults the Urim and Thummim to discern who violated his command for his soldiers to not eat until their military campaign was complete. Note also that though the story suggests the objects helped Saul identity the right person (his son, Jonathon), Saul should have killed his son based on the oath he had taken but his men convince him to do otherwise.
[4] Jeremiah 23:34-36
This sort of framing is so common and presented so matter-of-factly in the Old Testament that the casual reader just assumes that God spoke in an audible voice that was as clear to figures like David as mine would be to you if we were speaking face-to-face.
But there is compelling evidence in the scriptures to suggest that was not the case.
In the story I just mentioned, for instance, David consults the Lord only after requesting that Abiathar the priest bring him what was called the sacred ephod, a garment that was supposed to be worn by the high priest when he ministered before the Lord in the tabernacle, something that by the time of the events recorded in 1 Samuel 30 hadn’t happened in a while.
The point is that it seems David “discerned” God’s permission to attack the Amalekites after consulting and interpreting a sacred object, not necessarily because he heard the audible voice of God, though it makes perfect sense the story would be recorded that way. If you believed God was giving you permission to attack your enemies you aren’t going to say, “I stared at a special robe for an hour and eventually had this internal sense that God was ok with me killing people.”
You’re going to say, “And the Lord said…”
And what David did seems to have been common practice.
At pretty much the same time David was trying to figure out if God was cool with him taking vengeance against the Amalekites, King Saul was trying to figure out what God would have him do about an army of Philistines that had drawn up battle lines against him. Only in Saul’s case, God didn’t answer.
The story says, “He asked the Lord what he should do, but the Lord refused to answer him, either by dreams or by sacred lots or by the prophets.”[2]
It seems there were commonly accepted ways in which people “heard from the Lord.” Dreams were common. People had dreams, assumed that God was speaking to them through those dreams, and then interpreted those dreams to “discern” what God was saying. The most notable example of this is probably the story of Joseph.
But keep in mind that lots of people failed to interpret Pharoah’s dream before they reached out to Joseph, suggesting that interpreting dreams was not exactly straightforward. There was plenty of room for error.
Or as in Saul’s case, just not having any dreams to interpret.
Another option was “sacred lots.” This probably refers to what are identified in the Old Testament as the “Urim and Thummim,” mysterious, sacred objects that were kept inside or attached to the high priest’s breastplate (hoshen). The priest would “consult” these objects as a way of discerning truth or God’s will.[3]
This is probably not an entirely fair comparison, but that feels a little like rolling dice. At the risk of sounding sacrilegious and/or elitist and superior, it appears that to “hear God’s voice” it was common for people to talk to rocks they believed were special.
But I’m sure the results were always accurate and trustworthy.
If dreams and lots didn’t work, they had prophets. And while you might like to think this one was ironclad, there’s plenty of internal evidence to suggest it was not. First, lots of people claimed to be prophets. There wasn’t something like “prophet college” you had to graduate from or a “prophet exam” people had to pass to certify they heard from God. Anyone could claim the role and thus anyone could emerge from a little quiet time claiming to have heard from God.
Sound familiar?
Second, many of these so-called “prophets” served in official court roles as advisors to kings, kings like Saul. But I’m sure none of them ever felt the pressure to tell their respective kings what they wanted to hear and pass it off as “the word of the Lord.” That never happens.
Oh wait…check out the story of Ahab in 1 Kings 22.
So many people in the Old Testament self-identified as prophets, claiming to hear the voice of God and the authority to speak on behalf of God, that the prophet Jeremiah had to outlaw prophetic claims. He forbade anyone from using the phrase “I have a prophecy from the Lord” because, people were…get this…”using it to give authority to their own ideas, turning upside down the words of our God, the living God, the Lord of Heaven’s armies.”[4]
I can’t believe people would do that.
When the Old Testament uses phrases like “God said” or “the Lord told them,” many modern Bible readers have been trained by a certain kind of Biblicism to assume people back then heard the clear, audible, unambiguous voice of God and then just did what they were told. That’s why these stories are in the Bible, right? Because God spoke to people?
But if many of these stories depict something that actually happened in historic space and time, if you could hop in a time machine and travel back to when the event took place, I’m pretty sure that’s not what you would witness. I don’t think you’d hear God’s audible voice say to David, “Yes, go after them. You will surely recover everything that was taken from you!” I think you’d observe David engage in some kind of “discernment process” that involved the use of what he considered to be a sacred object and emerge from that process with the conviction that God had authorized him to wage war.
Since people still do this sort of thing today…all the time…that shouldn’t sound to you like an entirely far-fetched idea.
But I understand that to a Bible reader trained on a certain kind of Biblicism, the suggestion that just because the Bible claims that someone heard from God does not mean he actually did, could feel…unsettling. The kneejerk reaction is to think, “Well then can I trust anything the Bible says?”
Again, for a person trained on a certain kind of Biblicism, I get that reaction.
The simple shift is this: instead of feeling like you have to believe what the Bible describes for no other reason than because the Bible describes it, you only have to accept; 1) that the characters in the story or the author of the story believed it and wrote it down as such as a consequence; and 2) Because God can only communicate with people in language they can understand, to advance the plot of redemption, God let the story ride as documented.
In other words, God doesn’t swoop in and correct everyone every time they say or do something they believe came from God when it didn’t. Perhaps we wish God would. Maybe then we wouldn’t have so much trauma from our last church.
But that’s simply not how it works. Like us, everyone in the Old Testament was engaged in acts of interpretation, trying to discern God’s voice and will, sometimes making use of signs and objects that today most people would consider outrageously irresponsible.
I’m sure there were times they got it right, just as we do. I’m sure there were also times they got it wrong, just as we do. Just because they wrote it down in a book they considered divinely inspired and useful does not mean everything they wrote communicated perfectly accurate, timeless truths about God, any more than is true every time a pastor speaks from a Sunday pulpit (or Tuesday blog post).
[1] 1 Samuel 30:8
[2] 1 Samuel 28:6
[3] See for example 1 Samuel 14:36-42 when King Saul consults the Urim and Thummim to discern who violated his command for his soldiers to not eat until their military campaign was complete. Note also that though the story suggests the objects helped Saul identity the right person (his son, Jonathon), Saul should have killed his son based on the oath he had taken but his men convince him to do otherwise.
[4] Jeremiah 23:34-36
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