A Voice, Small, a Whisper

1 Kings 19 has always been one of my favorite passages in Scripture. This is the one where Elijah has been told that God is about to pass over, so he goes and stands on the mountain. Here are verses 11 and 12:

"Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence."

In my Hebrew class, we're going through the Elijah and Elisha cycles, so we recently worked through this passage, and it was fascinating. Now, don't cry, but I'm going to reproduce the above excerpt in Hebrew here:

ורוח גדולה וחזק מפרק הרים ומשבר סלעים לפני יהוה לא ברוח יהוה ואחר הרוח רעש לא ברעש יהוהואחר הרעש אש לא באש יהוה ואחר האש קול דממה דקה

The word economy here is incredible. The Hebrew uses almost no verbs. It's a ton of nouns and prepositions, because Hebrew can do that.

I think my favorite part of this passage is the very last snippet. "קול דממה דקה" gets translated in a ton of different ways:

• "a sound of sheer silence" (NRSV)
• "a still small voice" (KJV)
• "a sound of a gentle blowing" (NASB)
• "a gentle whisper" (NIV)
• "the sound of a low whisper" (ESV)
• sibilus aurae tenuis/"a whistling of a gentle air" (Latin Vulgate/Douay-Rheims Bible)

All right, that was TMI, but my point is that there's no real consensus about how exactly to translate those 3 words. The Hebrew pretty much just says "A voice, small, a whisper." It's pretty ambiguous. And I really, really like that.

The whole point of this passage is that God doesn't come in the forms we might expect--wind, earthquake, fire. He comes in a still small voice (for once, I like the KJV best). So many musical artists have picked up on this and run with it. Nichole Nordeman sings, "Oh great God, be small enough to hear me now." Audrey Assad, similarly, sings, "Let me hear a still small voice." There's something about a soft, intimate whisper that is more powerful than wind, earthquake or fire, especially coming from the God that made and controls them all.