Baalazel

The progression is clear in the Bible. God forms Adam from the dirt. God gets his hands dirty. He walks in the garden. He skins animals. He asks Cain where Abel is. He no longer reveals his bodily form. He speaks only. By the 11 chapter of Genesis God is in heaven looking down at Babel, a distant and worried deity.

Baal

Cege

Ok, so God has gone from a visible presence walking and talking with Adam and Eve in the garden to an invisible presence standing before Samuel in the tent, but I still don't understand how Samuel could tell that God was "standing" there. Maybe the writer is just using metaphor?

Or maybe since Samuel was just a boy, Eli or someone writing the story later filled in some detail.

Doug Shaver

I would assume, until I had clear evidence to the contrary, that what the author does describe is what he was attempting to describe.
Well, let's see. You said you were talking about the last verse of I Samuel 3. In my KJV it says there:
Assuming the translation is accurate, I'd be inclined to think that in the author's mind, Samuel probably saw something, though not necessarily a humaniform body. However, I don't think the language rules out a supposition that Samuel didn't see anything but only heard a voice.

I doubt that the author of I Samuel was quite as primitive as the average goatherder of his time, but I would not suppose that he was as intellectually sophisticated as the average philosopher of his time. He was probably not concerned with producing a rigorously coherent narrative. The primary point he wished to make was simply that Samuel knew certain things by divine revelation. The precise method by which God transferred information from his mind to Samuel's mind was probably of little or no concern to him. God, being God, could make it happen any way he wanted it to happen, and Samuel, being righteous, would have gotten the message no matter how it arrived.

Clouseau

The phrase 'the Lord appeared' is often used when the only manifestation recorded is God's speech. We may note that Yahweh revealed himself by 'the word of Yahweh', not just 'by his word', signifying that revelation came by divine utterance, not by physical appearance.

Cege

It would seem to be a huge oversight not to mention Samuel seeing "something" if he indeed had said he did. Previous to Eli's and Samuel's time there had been a cloud manifestation of God inside the tent.

Sometime in the 350 or so years between Moses and that time the cloud manifestation had apparently ended.

-Jay-

Depends on whether or not the "something" adds any significance to the story.

Why do you suspect it ended?

The transition from an anthropomorphic God who walks in the garden, fashions leather clothes, and shuts the door behind Noah to a distant, remote cloud/voice is meaningful. Decreasing intervention by God on a day-to-day basis would have been a reflection of what the Biblical authors saw in their every day lives. Ascribing such a decrease in intervention to a failure on the part of the Hebrews to uphold a covenant is a convenient explanatory mechanism. I think there's an implicit embryonic God-of-the-Gaps model displayed here.

regards,

NinJay

Cege

I suspect that the Israelites lost interest. As you suggest, it could have been a reflection of their everyday lives. Things were going ok, the average person didn't need an intervention by a God to accomplish anything that affected daily life.

Then when a crisis occurs in the form of a loss to the Philistine army, people lean to a dependence on help from their God.

The story moves from Samuel hearing an audible voice and being admired by the general population to (Chapt 4) a time of war with the Philistines. Right off the bat there's a defeat and the people decide that bringing the ark of the covenant into the battlefield is what's lacking for victory.

Did the Israelites of that time believe that their God was literally enthroned just above that ark/chest or that he just visited there when he had something to say to Samuel? When the ark was lost in battle to the Philistines, did the Israelites believe that their God was in Ashdod, etc hovering above the cherubim?

Clouseau

With the exception of the building of the Temple, there is a steady decrease in physical artefacts and phenomena relating to the deity through the OT, a weaning, perhaps, away from the material to the abstract, leading eventually to the 'atheism' that the Romans despised, and to a faith in which a leading member could state:

'"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."' Ac 17:24 NIV

Roger Pearse

Do those involved in this bible study know that you are involving outsiders in this way? If not, hadn't you better ask? -- Anyone running a bible study which includes an atheist may get annoyed if they learn that he is silently running everything said past a forum of outsiders with a view to controverting it. Hands on the table, gentlemen, and all that.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Cege

Roger, I'm not running anything said in my class past the forum here. The questions and comments are my own.

The information I solicit here will not be either known or given by class members.