One of the most famous of all the ancient Jewish songs we call the Psalms is number 139, which talks about the writer’s understanding of God. A contemporary Christian view of God tends towards a view of the divine that is at once distant, and controlling. This is a way of thinking that owes as much to Greek mythology as anything else.
The God of the 139th Psalm on the other hand is somehow different: “If I go to the highest heights, you are there, if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” God is at once in all places. We tend to think of this physically, that there is no ‘where’ that God isn’t. But actually the text goes beyond even this, beyond the physical: the word we translate as ‘depths’ is the Greek word šə·’ō·wl (sheol), which means ‘grave’ or even ‘hell’. This is an idea which transcends physicality.
There is nowhere, in life, or in death, surmises the poet, that is beyond his sense of the divine. This is not a remote, controlling God, not the ‘deadbeat dad’ of popular religion, it is an intimate, animated divinity, coursing like life itself through the veins and arteries of the universe, present in every dimension. The poetic language used here speaks of an idea of the divine which transcends the kind of boundaries which we seek to put in to place, nothing is cut off. This is a very deep idea of God.
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