The Divine Face as Theopoeia in the Psalter: Insights from the Orthodox Tradition

Ever since the launch of the historical-critical approach, academic studies of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament have been dominated by its presupposition that, against the overwhelming witness of early and Orthodox Christian interpretive traditions (as well as early Jewish), in the Scriptures one is given narratives—stories, messages, descriptions, concepts, etc. Nevertheless, the Book of Psalms has consistently frustrated this interpretive instinct fundamental to academic studies. My paper—building on this frustration and drawing on recent proposals to discard historical criticism as a useful approach to the Old Testament—argues that the Psalter on its own is aligned with the aforementioned early and eastern Christian appropriations of it. More specifically, the Psalter puts forth the imagery of the “Face” of God in a de-narrativized fashion, neither as a concept, nor as a description (belonging to a past to be recalled or re-actualized in the act of reading), but as an open and ongoing divine embodiment to be had by the visionary and the hearer-speaker of the scriptural text at once.