you will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Volumes of theology have been spun out
of these enigmatic words. Imagining the deity in frankly physical terms was entirely
natural for the ancient monotheists: This God had, or at least could assume, a
concrete manifestation which had front and rear, face and back, and that face
man was forbidden to see. But such concreteness does not imply conceptual naïveté.
Through it the Hebrew writer suggests an idea that makes good sense form later theological
perspectives that God’s intrinsic nature is inaccessible, and perhaps also
intolerable, to the finite mind of man, but that something of His attributes—His
“goodness,” the directional pitch of This ethical intentions, the afterglow of
the effulgence of His presence—can be glimpsed by humankind. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 1:347-48)
Further
Reading:
