The middle verses of chapter 19 in First Kings describes a time when the prophet Elijah meets God.
There are some mighty forces mentioned in that piece: a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces…and after the wind an earthquake…and after the earthquake a fire (1 Kg 19:11-12 NRSV).
In other parts of the Bible, we would expect to find God there! Psalms speak of God in hurricane force winds. Matthew talks about an earthquake when God rolled the stone away from Jesus’ tomb.
And of course, the fire of God’s Spirit at Pentecost.
But here, for Elijah, even though he may have expected it, the passage repeats and repeats…the Lord was not in the wind…the Lord was not in the earthquake…the Lord was not in the fire…
Even though he would have expected God to speak to him out of wind or fire, in fact, it was not until Elijah heard “a sound of sheer silence” (NRSV) that he perceived God was present and was speaking.
‘A sound of sheer silence.’
What a strange expression!
In a way it does not make any sense at all. It is an oxymoron: two opposite ideas brought together in a single phrase. Sound. Silence.
Where does such a notion come from? If you looked at the Hebrew phrase, as it was originally written down, the words are ‘kol demanah dakah’.
Over the centuries, that is a phrase that English translators have struggled to capture in an English expression, and have, mostly failed!
The very first English translation, the King James authorized version which has given us some beautiful and memorable phrases, was the first to take a stab at it in the early 17th century, but they could not figure out how silence could have a sound and decided that sound must have been a voice – a still and small voice.
The voice of God, they assumed, could be breathless and minute! Some 370 years later, the New International Version translators tried again, but they also assumed that Elijah would experience a voice; this time, “a gentle whisper” of a voice.
At about the same time, the translators of the Jerusalem Bible chose a “gentle breeze” as their expression of what Elijah experienced.
And so it goes. Each translator tries to capture what kol demanah dakah actually means to say. And they cannot pin it down!
Isn’t that so like the Holy Spirit?
I have often heard people try to describe a time when they have been touched by the Holy Spirit or have heard God speak to them, and usually they are at the very same loss for words.
They will say it was “kind of like this” or “sort of like that” and ultimately, it was something they simply cannot explain in ordinary words. For it is usually not a literal kind of speech. It is not the kind of thing you can trust your ears to have heard or your mind to have grasped.
It just is. And then you just know! “Aha. That was a message from God,” you say.
The key is in the trusting.
Because Elijah trusted that God would direct him, through the ‘sheer silence’ he came to understand what God wanted him to do. May we be so blessed with ears to perceive how to be prophets in our own time.
By Rev. Barbara Zimmerman is the pastor of the Castor United Church.