Concerning Dust and Ashes: Affects of Horror in the Hebrew Bible

In the Hebrew Bible, encounters with the divine are always laced with a mixture of awe and terror. This holds true for priestly interactions, for Job's theophanic confrontation, and for many descriptions offered by the psalmists. In some instances, these encounters are experienced by the characters within the narrative, and presented to the reader, as an experience of the sublime, in which marvel and fear mingle together, but are eventually resolved into the emotion of wonder. In other instances, fear overwhelms the divine encounter and turns it into an experience of transcendent terror. This sublime horror is the focus of Concerning Dust and Ashes, which explores how the Bible uses horror to introduce ideas that our rational minds would reject, allowing us to explore our relationship to the cosmos, the unfriendly spaces of the world, and the nature of the divine. Brandon R.