The Lambent Presence: The Shining Face of God in the Old Testament

Included among the lines of the Priestly Blessing is the prayer that ‘the LORD [would] cause his face to shine upon you’ (Numbers 6:25), at least as it is often translated. This prayer has a small number of echoes in the rest of the Hebrew Bible with sufficient similarity to suggest something like a formulaic usage, and enough difference to raise questions about the meaning of the saying in each of its contexts. Beyond this, how should this anthropomorphism be understood? What does it mean for God’s ‘face’ to ‘shine’: is this a simple, transparent metaphor? Or does its elucidation require some deeper investigation? This exploration of the ‘shining face’ of the Deity further attempts to make a contribution to a (Christian) theology of ‘divine light’, for which previous accounts have tended to ignore this potentially illuminating set of texts.