Page 93 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

COINCIDENCES IN THE BIBLE AND IN BIBLICAL HEBREW
72 72 COINCIDENCES IN THE BIBLE AND IN BIBLICAL HEBREW

• When Moses turns to God and asks, “Show me thy glory” (Exod.
33:18), he is responded to by the Divine: “And it shall come to pass,
while my glory passes by, …, and I will take away my hand and thou
shall see my back: but my face shall not be seen” (Exod. 33:22–23).
Jewish sages interpreted this as implying that a human being can only
see the deeds of God post-factum, after they have occurred, and not
in advance. This gives a general sense of how randomness is perceived
in the Bible: what may seem as random, when perceived in real time,
may indeed be intentional and purposeful, and also look like this, when
observed post-factum.
• Just before Moses is about to ascend Mount Nebo to depart from this
world, God is warning Moses about the catastrophes that may befall the
people of Israel if they violated the covenant that God had made with
them: “Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day … and
I will hide my face from them … And I will surely hide my face [liter-
1
ally, “hide the hiding,” haster astir ] on that day for all the evils which
they shall have perpetrated” (Deut. 31:17–18). This sentence served to
explain the name of another book of the Bible, the book of Esther (refer
to section 16.2 and the next paragraph).

• In the book of Esther, the latter is the central figure, and the name of God
is not mentioned, not even once. However, the root of the name Esther
is “hide.” When one reads the book of Esther, it is self-explanatory (and
thus has it been traditionally interpreted by Jewish sages) that although
the conduct of the Divine is hidden and not addressed explicitly in the
book (and the name of Esther makes this clear), it is the intervention of
the Divine that is obviously behind the miraculous story of the rescue of
the Jews from the Holocaust that was ready for them, Nuremberg style:
“And books were dispatched by runners to all of the king kingdoms to
destroy to kill and to annihilate all the Jews … and the king and Haman
sat down to drink” (Esther 3:13–15).
• The hiding of the face of God is consistently related to in the Bible as
the reason for evil and mishaps that befall the children of Israel, either as
a people or as individuals. In fact, the verb “to hide” appears eighty-two
times in the whole Bible, and most of these hidings relate to the Divine
hiding his face. For example, “Your sins have been hiding my face from
you” (Isa. 59:2); “And I will hide my face from them” (Ezek. 39:23, 24);
“I was angry and stroke him, hiding and will be angry” (Isa. 57:17); “Do
not please hide your face from your servant” (Pss. 69:18).