Hear-See

All the people, experiencing the thunder and lightning, the trumpet blast and the smoking mountain, were afraid  Exodus 20:18a  The Message

Experiencing – When was the last time you saw thunder?  Ah, probably never.  We perceive thunder as audible, not visual.  So when we try to translate this particular verse from Hebrew, we run into problems because in Hebrew this verse says that the people “saw” the thunder and lightening.  Of course, translators do everything possible to “correct” the text (never telling you, the reader, otherwise).  For example:

And all the people were watching and hearing the thunder and the lightning flashes (NASB adds the correcting thought)

When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning (NLT rearranges and corrects the verb)

Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes (NKJV changes the verb)

Only the NIV and EST capture the oddity of the text:

All the people were seeing the thundering and the lightning,

The problem has been discussed for a thousand years.  Benjamin Sommer provides some useful analysis:[1]

The third phenomenon is the relationship between the verb ro’im (“saw”; past form of “see”) and its objects. One usually hears thunder but here, “All the people saw [ro’im] the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking” (20:15). Commentators have long debated whether this wording should be considered problematic or, even, paradoxical. Rabbi Akiva in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael, Rashi, and, following him, Nahum Sarna argue that the wording is deliberately paradoxical in speaking of a visual apprehension of an aural phenomenon. On the other hand, Rabbi Ishmael (in the same section of the Mekhilta) claims that the verse means to say that the Israelites saw the visible, but heard the aural. In a similar vein, Moshe David Cassuto maintains that this is a zeugma, an expression that includes partial incompatibility; in this case, we have a transitive verb (“see”) that is compatible with some of its objects (the lightning and the smoking mountain) and incompatible with others (the thunder and the blare of the horn). Ibn Ezra also rejected the idea of paradoxical wording and argued that the semantic range of the verb r-’-h sometimes includes “perceive” in a general sense, not just “perceive through the eyes.” In my opinion, even according to the opinion of Rabbi Ishmael and Cassuto, or Ibn Ezra, in this verse the least compatible object has been deliberately placed next to the verb in order to disturb the reader, and thereby to turn his attention to the nature of the revelation and the sensory experience involved in receiving the Torah. Was this a unique experience, inherently different from all other forms of communication? The wording of the verse is not necessarily paradoxical, but it is certainly problematic and liable to slow the readers down so that they can ponder how, precisely, the perceived matter came into the people’s mind.

Sommers’ example is used to raise the question about the process of revelation.  This odd text impels us to ask, “Was there a direct communication between God and the people or were the thoughts of God communicated through a human intermediary?”  Sommers frames the questions like this:

Did the people hear all Ten Commandments from the voice of God, or only some of them? Perhaps they did not hear the speech of God at all? Did God relate specific content directly to the people through the use of language, or was the revelation an experiential event, without verbal content?[2]

You might ask, “Why do we care?”  Isn’t this just an academic question, irrelevant to ordinary believers?  After all, we have the Bible to consult.  We don’t have to wait for God to verbally deliver His message.  But if we aren’t clear about how God delivered His words to the original audience, how do we know that we have His real words.  Perhaps all we really have are the thoughts of Moses, or any of the other prophets including Yeshua.  And if that’s the case, is our faith based on what some other human being said, or on what God actually told us?  The means of revelation is crucial, even if it happened thousands of years ago.  How do you know what God said, or even if He said anything at all?  You can pretend that it doesn’t matter, but you can only pretend.  Once the question is raised, you’ll need to find an answer.

Heschel accepted the Torah as an authoritative expression of the divine will and, at the same time, a supralinguistic phenomenon.  He contended that we cannot fully understand how this revelation was transmitted but we can, nevertheless, accept its authority.  This answer distinguishes between the event itself (the command) and the details of its transmission.  The approach has serious implications for Jewish thought.

Was revelation an overwhelming nonverbal event, or one that involved language? The first possibility leads us to one trend within Jewish thought that distinguishes between the concept of “command” (termed Gebot by Rosenzweig), which is of divine origin, and the details of the halakhah (Rosenzweig’s Gesetz), which are not necessarily of divine origin. The second possibility, that qol refers to speech, leads us to a different school of thought that holds that both the concept of command and the details of the commandments are of divine, not human, origin.[3]

You will recognize the teaching of orthodox Judaism, but you might not have been aware that there is another approach. Now you know—and you will have to make up your own mind.

Topical Index: revelation, paradox, event, authority, Exodus 20:18a

[1] Benjamin Sommer, “Revelation and Religious Authority in the Sinai Traditions,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible (Academic Series Press, 2019), p. 325.

[2] Ibid., p. 326.

[3] Ibid., p. 324.