Can God Read Minds?

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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 the womb to an even more hidden place, the mind. In Psalm 94 we read: “The Lord knows the thoughts of man” (Psalm 94:11). And another psalm tells us “He [God] knows what is concealed in the heart” (Psalm 44:22).

The notion that the biblical God not only sees our bodies but also knows our thoughts is one with which most scholars today would automatically agree. But in truth, God’s mind-reading abilities are not always as absolute or indubitable as we might suppose. Throughout the Hebrew Bible we find strong suggestions that God is—at least sometimes—not so all-knowing as the psalmist seems to think. For example, in Genesis 18:21, God says of the wickedness he has heard about in Sodom and Gomorrah, “Let me go down and see whether they have really acted as in the outcry which has come to me, and if not, I want to know about it.” How can a God who is able to see the unformed limbs of the embryo in the womb be unable to see what is going on in Sodom and Gomorrah without 034descending to earth for an inspection? What does this say about God’s ability to know the contents of human minds—something far more hidden, one would think, than the actions of the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah?

On this question, the Hebrew Bible seems actually to be of two minds—or, we should really say, two hearts.

In ancient Israel, the organ of thought was believed to be not the brain—a word that never occurs in the Bible—but leb, the heart. The Book of Chronicles mentions the “thoughts of the heart” (1 Chronicles 29:18); Judges speaks of “great searchings of the heart” (Judges 5:15). In Proverbs, the heart “hatches evil plots” (Proverbs 6:18). Sometimes the heart was also paired poetically with the kidneys, as when Jeremiah exclaims “O Lord of Hosts, O just Judge, Who test the kidneys and the heart” (Jeremiah 11:20), these last typically being translated as “the thoughts and the mind.”² The verb most frequently used to describe God’s activity with regard to the human heart is ÷jb (bahan), meaning “try” or “test”—a term used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the testing of metal for purity (Zechariah 13:9; Job 23:10). The writer of Psalm 139 pleads, “Examine me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts” (Psalms 139:23).³ In Psalm 26:2, we read, “Probe me, O Lord, and try me, test my kidneys and heart [heart and mind].”

The unspoken assumption in these passages is that when God wants to know what is in a particular human being’s mind, he cannot sense it directly but has to deduce it somehow. God must examine the heart/mind from the outside; like a technician with a lump of ore, he puts it to the fire to discover what it is made of and to remove any dross.

The Hebrew term hsn (nisah), which also means “test, try” but has no technological connotation, is used similarly throughout the Bible to describe God testing mankind. The most familiar example is Genesis 22:1, in which God “put Abraham to the test (nisah)” by creating a situation that forces Abraham to make a choice and thereby lay bare the true composition of his heart. God commands Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2). Later readers have assumed that God knows in advance how Abraham will react.⁴ But if we take the biblical story at face value, we see that God does not probe Abraham’s beliefs and feelings directly, but uses his extreme request to reveal them. Genesis 22:12 confirms this interpretation: “Do not raise your hand against the boy, do nothing to him! For now I know that you are a fearer of God—you have not withheld your only son from me.” Now I know. Only after Abraham has lifted his hand to slay his son does God know what his heart/mind is made of.

God employs similar methods in 2 Chronicles 32:31, where we read that “God abandoned [Hezekiah] in order to test him, to know all that was in his heart.” The same expression, “to test you, to know what is in your heart,” is also found in Deuteronomy 8:2, where the test is the forty years of wandering through the wilderness:

Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that He might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep His commandments or not.

The wilderness essentially provided a laboratory environment where, in sterile and controlled conditions, God could experiment on the Israelites. Again, we may glean from this that God could not be sure what the Israelites thought without seeing their behavior; he couldn’t just read their minds.⁵

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On the face of it, then, a passage such as Psalm 44:22, in which God “knows what is concealed in the heart,” would seem to offer a contradiction. But when we read the passage in context we find that even here, God’s knowledge is indirect; otherwise, why would he have to “search out” anything?

If we forgot the name of our God and spread out our hands [in prayer] to a strange God,

Would not God search this out? For he knows

what is concealed in the heart.

God must see the Israelites raising their hands in prayer to a foreign deity before he knows what they are really thinking. He does know what is concealed in the heart—but only by inferring it.

Not even the phrase “The Lord knows the thoughts of man” from Psalm 94:11 is so clear when we read it in context. The whole line actually reads: “The Lord knows the thoughts of man, that they are futile.” It is a grammatical structure found elsewhere in the Bible, for instance Genesis 6:2—“the sons of the Gods saw the daughters of Man, that they were attractive,” which simply means they “saw that they were attractive.” Psalm 94:11 must be similarly interpreted as “The Lord knows that the thoughts of men are futile.”

As we reread these passages carefully, we find that the Bible includes only one explicit statement of God’s ability to read minds: Jeremiah 20:12, which calls God one who “sees the kidneys and the heart.” The automatic assumption that God can read minds has prevented scholars from recognizing this as a unique occurrence in the Hebrew Bible. It’s the one small phrase that can be interpreted as directly supporting God’s mind-reading ability.⁶ Even here, however, many scholars think that the word “see” was mistakenly put in the text by a scribe who was thinking of the following phrase: “Let me see your vengeance upon them.”

There are, however, occasional implicit suggestions that God can read minds. Take Genesis 17–18 for example, in which God reveals to the 100-year-old Abraham that his 90-year-old wife Sarah will bear him a son. “Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed, as he said to himself, ‘Can a hundred-year-old man father a child? Will Sarah, who is ninety, give birth?’” (Genesis 17:17). Abraham then says, audibly, to God: “O that Ishmael might live by Your favor!” (Genesis 17:18). God’s first response is not to what Abraham says out loud, however, but to what Abraham has said “to himself”: “Sarah will, indeed, bear you a son” (Genesis 17:19), the Lord says, then adding, “As to Ishmael, I heed you” (Genesis 17:20).

In the next episode, it is Abraham’s nonagenarian wife Sarah whose mind—or rather, heart—God appears to read. Sarah is eavesdropping on her husband as he speaks with the three divine messengers who have come to tell the couple that they will have a son. “And Sarah laughed within her, saying ‘Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?’” (Genesis 18:12). God immediately questions Abraham about her response, and even quotes her thoughts to him: “Why,” he says to Abraham, “did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?’ Is anything too wondrous for the Lord?” 036(Genesis 18:13–14). To this, “Sarah lied, saying, ‘I did not laugh.’” But God says, “No, you laughed all right” (Genesis 18:15).

In both episodes, God “hears” what the characters have tried to hide. So we are presented with a problem: Usually God cannot read minds, but every once in a while the stories portray God as actually seeing, hearing and knowing all. How can we explain this contradiction?

Often, discrepancies between two biblical texts will be resolved by appealing to multiple authorship: The Hebrew Bible was written by different people, scholars will argue, each interpreting God and defining the limits of divine omniscience differently. Without rejecting that notion, I would like to suggest that there is more to it. After all, God’s effortless reading of Abraham’s and Sarah’s minds occurs in the same book as his descent to earth to check on Sodom and Gomorrah.

But consider: Except for the one, probably mistaken, passage in Jeremiah, the passages in which God seems to be able to read minds are stories. Could it be that the limits of God’s omniscience are determined less by theological certainties than by the dramatic imperatives of storytelling?

In stories, often one thing happens just so another (more important) thing can happen, or even just so that the reader can learn something important about a character. I suggest that the main reason God goes to Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, is not to check on things personally—that’s simply a pretext. He goes there in order to give Abraham the opportunity to bargain with him. The author limits God’s omniscience to serve the needs of the narrative—that is, to tell a good story.

Similarly, though most of the Bible represents God as unable to read minds, the biblical narrators sometimes give him this power for the purposes of a 044particular story. God’s ability to hear and reply to Abraham’s and Sarah’s inner thoughts shows us, in both cases, something important about God: You can’t keep secrets from him.

Robert Alter has argued that omniscience is something that God “lends” to the biblical narrator.⁷ I would say the opposite—that omniscience is something the narrator lends to God. God knows what the narrator needs him to know to serve the purposes of a particular story. When it suits the story to have God know what is in the heart of a character like Abraham or Sarah, then God is omniscient; at other times, as in the story of the binding of Isaac, it makes a better story to keep the Almighty in the dark.

So, can God read minds? According to the Bible, sometimes he can, sometimes he can’t. It’s a useful reminder: The Bible is not an encyclopedia of theology. It conveys 045its profound truths in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, in stories that we, too, must test if we wish to understand them fully.

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 […]