Chapter 9 Summary

Dramatists from Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett have used missing or absent characters to hold attention. God opens the curtain himself on the Tanakh and is never completely offstage thus far, but in the Psalms there is a growing sense that Israel is bravely and patiently waiting for God to resume his leading role. There is a continuum: presence, absent presence, present absence and absence. God was an absent presence in the Book of Isaiah — his voice and scent still linger. God becomes a present absence - quite gone and missed - in Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi and the Psalms and moves towards complete absence in the Book of Proverbs. God is simply absent - hard even to recall having been there - from Song of Songs and above all Esther. The books considered here and in Chapter 10 are like familiar music mixed with...