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Chapter 6

Exodus: Gods & Kings

What Does God’s Voice Really Sound Like?

With its controversial decision concerning the Voice of God, the movie Exodus: Gods & Kings demonstrates the fact that we cannot state any claims about the nature of God as a matter of fact. We can, however, make truth-claims about what we believe to be the nature of God—and within these truth-claims, we should allow for greater, not lesser, diversity of beliefs, for the Bible itself showcases God—and the voice of God—in many different tones.

Ever since Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston’s heavily modified voice as the voice of God in his Ten Commandments (1956), we have become so accustomed to thinking that the voice of God is supposed to sound like a deep male voice that the phrase “the voice of God” itself has become a synonym for “deep male voice.”

But the voice of God has not always been imagined as having sounded like “the voice of God.” The voice of God has at times been imagined as sounding like your parent’s voice (which could either be benign, benevolent, or terrifying, depending upon what kind of relationship you’ve had with your parents); at times, God’s voice has been imagined as a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12); and at other times, God’s voice—when actually heard by the prophet Samuel—was so ordinary-sounding that when God called out to Samuel (1 Samuel 3), Samuel thought it was his teacher Eli. It took God four—four!—calls to Samuel to get the young nonplussed prophet’s attention that it was actually God on the line, so to speak. (Thus proving that it was God—not Verizon or T-Mobile—who invented Caller ID.)

This is why Ridley Scott’s decision to cast an 11-year-old boy (Isaac Andrews, a British actor) as the voice of God in the 3D extravaganza Exodus: Gods and Kings, which opened this week, is not only innovative and refreshing, but is in fact restorative and startlingly traditional. The Bible more often portrays God’s voice as sounding ordinary and meek (or “still” and “small,” as God tells the prophet Elijah what His voice sounds like) than booming and thunderous. The critics who are deriding Scott’s decision as heretical, blasphemous, or somehow unfaithful to Scripture, seem to be overlooking Scripture’s actual descriptions of God’s voice.

To claim that we know anything about God as a matter of factual certainty, let alone that we know something as specific as how God’s voice sounds, is a fallacy. Theology is not an empirical discipline; we cannot know anything of the nature of God in the same way in which we can know the nature of Saturn’s rings. The latter, unlike the former, is discoverable through astronomic explorations, scientific investigations, and empirical observations. Theology is closer to an art than a science; just as something is “true” in art if it resonates with something deep within us, or is reflective of our emotional intuition of the way in which we experience the world, so too, a theological claim is “true” if it harmonizes with our emotions, is reflective of our lives, or offers us a meaningful narrative for our existence. As the prophet Isaiah—or as biblical scholars would have it, Second Isaiah—himself declared about God,

To whom can you compare Me

Or declare me similar?

To whom can you like Me,

So that we seem comparable? (Isaiah 46:5)

Even the biblical prophets seemed to understand that, while we could make certain theological truth-claims about God, we could never truly understand anything about the nature of God with any degree of factual certainty. We could, perhaps, experience [what we believe to be] God’s “hand” in history, in our lives, and in whatever we believe to be moments of transcendence, but we can never know, as a matter of fact, what God’s “hand” looks like, anymore so that we can ever know if God even has a “hand.”^[1]

Thus, to claim to know what the voice of God sounds like as a matter of fact is as dubious a truth-claims as a claim that one knows what the exact meaning of Smetana’s “Ma Vlast” is with factual certainty. Not only can one not know the meaning of a Smetana symphony with factual certainty, but one cannot even know how exactly the Smetana symphony is supposed to sound with factual certainty. Perhaps Smetana intended it to be played in different ways at different times; perhaps Smetana knew that in his time, it would be played one way and later, when the craft of music, the individual members of an orchestra, the variety of conductors’ interpretations of the piece—and the instruments themselves—undergoes change, its sound would be subtly but noticeably different. We have evidence—not scientific or historical, but biblical evidence—that, just as God was experienced in different ways at different times in history, so too, the sound of God’s voice was experienced in different ways at different times in ancient history.

Moreover, traditional theology—Jewish tradition, at least—insists that God’s voice is not uniform: though Jews are monotheists, we do not believe that God speaks in monotone. God’s words are polyphonous—subject to multiple interpretations and mani-layered readings. “‘Is not my word like fire,’ declares the Lord, ‘and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces’”? says the prophet Jeremiah (23:29). Scripture can encompass multitudes of interpretations (up to seventy, according to Jewish tradition), in part because God Himself is multi-dimensional and cannot be understood in a simple, facile glance. “Truth is various,” wrote the prophetic Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader; “truth comes to us in different guises; it is not with the intellect alone that we perceive it.”^[2] According to the talmudic interpretation of Jeremiah—“these and these are the words of the living God,” for “just as a hammer shatters a rock into many pieces, so does one biblical verse (God’s word) convey many meanings”^[3]—Ms. Woolf may as well have been writing about theological truth as artistic truth.

And not only is the word of God heard in many different ways, but the voice of God itself, suggests Jewish tradition, is heard in many different tones. When Moses heard God speak to him for the first time at the burning bush, the ancient rabbis stated that God’s voice sounded to Moses like that of his father Amram.

If God’s image is not exactly in the eye of the beholder—after all, the Bible states that one cannot look at God and live—the sound of God’s voice does seem to be in the ear of the listener. According to rabbinic theology, just as Moses experienced God’s voice in a certain way, so too, no two individuals experience God in the same fashion; God reveals Himself to individuals in a fashion that “corresponds to the capacity of each individual listener.”^[4] The Rabbis of the Talmud teach that when God spoke to the entire Jewish people during the theophany at Sinai, each person’s understanding of God differed, because God chose to make Himself understood “according to the comprehension of each.”^[5] The God’s-voice-as-Moses’-father theory is the most radical tonal shift of all: it suggests that God, far from being a perfect, solid, never-changing rock, is in fact promethean, mutable, and—yes—even occasionally mercurial. If God’s voice changes to suit the ear of the listener, then the divine word—like the sound of the divine voice itself—may also be open to new, multiple tones and interpretations. If, as the rabbis explain, God spoke to Moses with the voice of his father in order to put Moses at ease rather than scare him away with a big, booming Hestonian voice, what’s to say that God didn’t drop down an octave or two to speak to Joshua with the voice of a young boy? To suggest that God is constrained to only a certain vocal range is to limit the God’s power—and what faith-professing Bibliophile would deign to be guilty of such diabolic doubting of the Deity’s Do-Re-Me’s?

In fact, even though Christian groups have been more outspoken than Jews in their protests against Ridley Scott’s use of a young boy’s voice as the voice of God, the Christian tradition may contain an even more overt suggestion that the voice of God—or at least voices thought to be associated with the voice of God—can be a young child’s voice. After all, it was a child’s voice that Augustine heard which catalyzed Augustine’s conversion process. When Augustine heard a child’s voice repeating the phrase “Tolle, lege: pick up and read!,” he interpreted this voice as a sign from God, opened up the New Testament, and the rest of this mystery is theological history: the most consequential theologian in Western Christianity was born, inspired by a child’s voice which he chose to interpret as sent by God.^[6]

Yet, even if we are to concede that the divine may deign to speak to individuals with the voice of a child, an even more radical—if still thoroughly traditional—tonal shift is waiting to be made. The Talmud speaks of God as speaking to the wise through a heavenly voice termed a bat-kol: literally, a “daughter of a voice.” The implication is clear: God can make His—nay, Her—voice sound like a woman’s voice. If Scott can direct a movie in which a Gladiator-like Moses hears God speak to him with the voice of an 11-year-old boy, how far off are we from Kathryn Bigelow’s Book of Judges movie in which a Xena: Warrior Princess-like Deborah hears God speak to her with the voice of an 81-year-old woman? And with a neurotic General Sisera played by Larry David? (Well, this last part may be unnecessary, but “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fans would enjoy the hilariously awkward Larry-Lucy Lawless reunion.) As long as the 81-year-old woman is voiced by a regal-sounding Brit—Judi Dench, let’s say?—I’m sure Americans would have no qualms with taking orders from a Heavenly voice that heavenly. (Heck, I wouldn’t disobey Judi Dench if she told me to chug a 16-ounce jar of wasabi.)

Would we really be able to stand in fear and awe before a feminine God? If presidential politics are any indication—the early word on the 2016 election is that a certain formidable woman is a shoe-in to become our 45th president—the answer is a resounding yes. I, for one, welcome our new female overlords—er, Lords, that should read, at least as far as one of them is concerned—and I would not be afraid if God spoke to me using the voice of a woman. But if He (sorry, old habits die hard) She spoke to me using Meryl Streep’s Clarissa Dalloway voice? As a bibliophile, I’d be terrified; but as a cinephile, I’d be delighted: God is just about the only remaining great (female?) historical figure that Ms. Streep has yet to play. Almost a century after Virginia Woolf demanded that women be given a room of their own, perhaps it is well-nigh time that women be given a voice of their own as well. Hollywood, are you listening? Because very, very soon, that authoritative voice in our ears will sound an awful lot more like our mother’s than our father’s voice. And for this revolutionary night-and-day voyage out of staid scales and modes toward exciting new-wave vocalizations, we have only our uninhibited imaginations—and God Herself—to thank.

Notes

1.

See the work of Maimonides in various places: The Guide to the Perplexed, generally, and Mishneh Torah [Code of Jewish Law], “Laws of the Fundamentals of Torah,” 1:12; cf. ibid., 1:9.

2.

Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” in The Common Reader (ed. Andrew McNeillie; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 32.

3.

Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 34a.

4.

B.T., Bava Metzia 59b.

5.

B.T., Chagigah 13b.

6.

See Augustine, Confessions (trans. Henry Chadwick; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), VIII: xii, p. 29.