Can God Read Minds? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > June 2002

Can God Read Minds?

By Michael Carasik

God knows all and sees all. That, at least, is what most Bible readers—and scholars—assume, and numerous biblical passages certainly appear to support the idea. The writer of Psalm 139, for instance, praises the omniscient God who watched him grow in the womb: My frame was not concealed from You when I was shaped in a hidden place, knit together in the recesses of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed limbs; they were recorded in Your book; in due time they were formed, to the very last one of them. (Psalm 139:15–16)1 It’s not a great leap from […]

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Endnotes

1.

English translations used throughout are primarily from the New Jewish Publication Society version of the Hebrew Bible.

2.

D. Kellerman (s.v. twylk, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterwech and Helmer Ringgren [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974–2001], vol. 7, p. 181) suggests that heart and kidneys together are meant to encompass the total interior life by representing both the upper and lower parts of the trunk and (respectively) the rational and emotional faculties.

3.

The Hebrew word for “thoughts” used here is found also only in Psalm 94:19; the dictionaries consider it to be derived from the root ¹[ (Job 4:13, 20:2) by insertion of the letter r.

4.

See Jerome I. Gellman, The Fear, the Trembling and the Fire: Kierkegaard and the Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994).

5.

On the testing motif, see Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), p. 306f. and literature noted by him on p. 305; also see William Henry Propp, Water in the Wilderness: A Biblical Motif and Its Mythological Background, Harvard Semitic Monographs 40 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 51–93.

6.

Moshe Garsiel (“Parallels Between the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Psalms” [Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv Univ., 1973], vol. 1, p. 171) noted both the uniqueness and the probable source of the expression, but in a different investigative context. The general, but not unanimous, consensus is that Jeremiah 20:12 is secondary to its context.

7.

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 157.