The Magnificent Otherness of Yahweh

I recently received a letter from a friend who expressed difficulties with certain Old Testament passages and requested my help coming to terms with them. Like many, she is turned off by the apparent harshness of Yahweh and struggles to reconcile what she reads about this fearsome deity with her own common sense of justice and morality and what she thinks a loving God should look like.

This is a common hangup. Many people find the depictions of God in the Old Testament problematic; they are embarrassed by certain Israelite narratives, such as Joshua’s herem warfare, Uzzah’s death for touching the Ark of the Covenant, or Elisha’s summoning bears to maul the teasing youth of Bethel (cf. Deut. 20:16-18; 2 Sam. 6; 2 Kgs. 2:23-25). Even the Church has acknowledged the problem. The working document for the 2008 Synod on the Word of God observed that “knowledge of the Old Testament…seems to be a real problem among Catholics…. Because of unresolved exegetical difficulties, many are reluctant to take up passages from the Old Testament which seem incomprehensible.” People struggle to figure out how the intimidating, warlike God of the Old Testament can be reconciled with the gentle, forgiving Gospel preached by Jesus Christ.

Though I sympathize with the difficulties my correspondent expressed, I have never considered God’s nature in the Old Testament to be a stumbling block. Quite the contrary. When I first read the Old Testament as a teenager, I was enamored by the mysterious figure of Yahweh. He made me sit up and take notice; He was compelling and mysterious. I was already familiar with the pagan mythologies of the Greeks and Norse, et al., which are heavily anthropocentric. As the mid-20th-century classicist Edith Hamilton noted, the Greeks and Norse made gods in their own image. It is easy to understand the adulteries of Zeus or the jealousy of Hera because these beings are fundamentally human actors, that is, they exhibit traits proper to human nature — humans endowed with certain special powers and abilities, yes, but still essentially human in their thoughts, character, and passions. They are recognizable and empathetic because they are presented as sharing our essential nature, warts and all. This makes them endearing and is one reason for the perennial popularity of pagan mythologies.

But when I came to Yahweh, I saw something radically different. Here is a mysterious, formless entity wreathed in smoke and flame; even to gaze upon His unfiltered essence is death, and the sound of His voice makes an entire nation quake in terror. Carelessly crossing into His sacred precincts is to court destruction; men are struck dead for accidentally touching His cultic object (cf. Exod. 19:18, 20:19, 39:25; 2 Sam. 6). He is the “Lord God of Hosts,” an entity of unfathomable grandeur whose very name was considered so sacred that it could not be pronounced safely. His utensils of liturgical worship in the tabernacle were so sacred that He warned the Levites that “they shall not go in to look upon the holy things even for a moment, lest they die” (Num. 4:20).

These stories and others like them signify that Yahweh is entirely other. He is awesome in the traditional sense of the word: He inspires awe. This is no humanized deity like Zeus, no bearded old man in the sky; this is an entity who is completely transcendent. His nature is so exceedingly greater than ours that He must hedge His interactions with us in a web of ritual, lest we be smitten by His presence, the way we accidentally step on ants on the sidewalk simply by virtue of their incidental proximity to an entity so much greater than themselves. This was a being who made me pay careful attention; one does not read the tales of the Exodus for entertainment, the way one reads Greek mythology. No, for here we have come to someone whose every description communicates: Take heed, for this is something dreadfully serious! Reading the tales of Yahweh was the first time I’d encountered religious literature that felt so real — real because this entity is so otherworldly, so foreign to human experience — that it impressed me with a striking (and terrifying) mark of authenticity. Yahweh was utterly unlike any deity concocted by the human imagination, and that was palpable in the Old Testament texts. Zeus is powerful, and Odin is wise, but only Yahweh is holy.

This also gave me a deep appreciation for the role of grace and the difference Christ makes. In the Old Testament there is no barrier, no “buffer” between God and man. Sin has dismantled man’s fellowship with God, leaving mankind exposed to the raw, consuming intensity of God’s power — fallen nature standing pitifully in the withering, blazing presence of He who dwells in unapproachable light (cf. 1 Tim. 6:16). We can honor and praise such an entity for His glory, but how can we commune with Him? The entire ceremonial of the Mosaic Law was a carefully constructed scaffolding erected so that sinful man might, in some limited way, be able to enter God’s presence — and even then with the greatest timidity, lest the meager boundary provided by the rituals be violated and Yahweh’s white-hot essence “break out against them” (Exod. 19:24).

The grace merited by Christ changes this dy­namic. Grace restores the communion between man and God; like lubricant flushed through a rusted machine, the grace of God replaces the grinding, “metal on metal” interactions of the Old Covenant with the fluid, dynamic relationality of the New. Whereas man once had to stand afar from the cloud of glory, now he is welcomed into it, for we are no longer strangers but sons and daughters, no longer terrified subservients fleeing God’s thundering voice but children who can confidently enter the throne room of grace and say, “Our Father” (cf. Heb. 4:6; Mt. 6:9). While, in all humility, we never forget the vast chasm of distinction between creature and Creator (which is why we still maintain decorum in our worship and don’t let our behavior in God’s presence degenerate into crass overfamiliarity), we nevertheless have the confidence to stand unashamed in His presence with a pure conscience, welcomed no longer as servants but as friends (cf. Jn. 15:15).

So, no, I don’t find the God of the Old Testament troubling, problematic, or an obstacle to faith. I find Him to be Other, a Being of mystery and power whose every action commands respect. He is a God who, by His majesty and holiness, compels worship — and whose actions in the Old Testament make Christ’s redemption in the New that much more comprehensible. I would not have learned to love Jesus Christ had I not first been enthralled by the unrestrained magnificence of Yahweh.

I recognize that this is not everyone’s experience, but it was mine, so I will never concur with the common critique that the Old Testament God is unappealing, cruel, or unlovable. On the contrary, I find His depiction the most convincing and compelling description of a transcendent being in the entire corpus of religious literature. Reading the Old Testament was the first time the concept of holiness meant anything to me, and its presentation of God as the smoldering Lord of Sinai has consistently been a source of awe, devotion, and consolation.

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