Page - 31 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

The Body and Voice of God in the Hebrew Bible | 31www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 23–33 The Thanksgiving Hymns26 even suggest that there is within the human voice something of the divine. The Hymns state, It is you who creates breath for the tongue and you know its words; you establish the fruits of the lips before they exist. You set words on the line and the movement of breath from the lips you measure. You bring forth sounds according to their mysteries, and the move- ments of breath from the lips according to its metre, so that they may tell of your glory and recount your wonders in all your works of truth and in all your righteous judgments; and so that your name be praised by the mouth of all, and so that they may know you according to their understanding and bless you forever (col. IX, ll. 25ff in Vermes; Unit 5 of 9:1–10:4 in Harkins).27 This extrabiblical passage unequivocally expresses that the human voice is envisaged as a divine creation, a tool for teaching about God, and a vehicle to praise God. The voice of God then, less controversially28 than the divine form, emerges from the Hebrew Bible as manifesting divine power. While in the Hebrew Bible the domi- nant impression is that the divine voice is not separate from a divine body, the cor- poreality of God is undermined by some few passages in the Hebrew Bible, notably Deuteronomy 4. This tendency to emphasise voice and mitigate divine form – with the striking exception of the hand – emerges clearly in later literature, post-dating the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Targumim and also the rabbinical writings. In Proverbs and in the Thanksgiving Hymns from Qumran, the human voice rather than the hu- man form reflects God, or maybe God’s likeness, which in Genesis 1 and 5 seems more straightforwardly to pertain to the physical likeness of God and of humans. Let me conclude with a delightful story from the Talmud, featuring the “daughter of a voice” (a literal translation of bat qôl), an expression that appears very frequently in post–Hebrew Bible Jewish writing. The expression can refer to a “sound” or “reso- nance” more generally but is used widely in rabbinic writing to refer to a heavenly or divine voice, proclaiming God’s judgment or will – either to individuals or to groups 26 The Thanksgiving Hymns, or Hodayot, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls near the site of Qumran. They have some similarity with the biblical Psalms. Their date of composition is difficult to establish. Geza Vermes proposes that the collection “attained its final shape during the last pre-Christian cen- tury”, but individual compositions may be considerably older. See Vermes 1997, 244. 27 Adapted from the translations of Vermes 1997, 255, and Harkins 2013, 2039–2040. Harkins points out that here “the hymnist describes the primordial origins of speech and thus praise. These lines presume a scenario like that found in Ps. 19:2–5, which describes the divine creation of speech” (Harkins 2013, 2039). 28 There may, however, be scope for controversy here too. Hence, in Boyarin 2004, Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin argues in a chapter entitled “The Crucifixion of the Memra: How the Logos Became Christian” that the notion of division of the godhead, which came to be associated with Christian logos-theology, had its counterpart in Judaism with Torah or Memra having some degree of autonomous divine status. Boyarin argues that logos-theology was “a living current within non-Christian Judaic circles from be- fore the Christian era until well into late antiquity, when the Palestinian Targums were produced” and that only a “complex process of splitting … ultimately gave rise to Judaism and Christianity” (131–132). The potential theological problem here is the suggestion that in Judaism there may have existed the notion of divine power that is also to some extent distinct and separate from God.