4.2 Actual use of “the right hand of God” in Tanakh
4.1.1 Anthropomorphic or not?
Using a concordance website, I found 28 uses of the right hand of God in the whole of Tanakh – I will list them all in my next post. 2 are in Exodus, 1 in Deuteronomy, 3 in Isaiah, 1 in Habakkuk, 19 in Psalms, and 2 in Lamentations.
You probably think that this is a really weird distribution because, if it was evenly distributed, you would have expected a lot of instances in the Torah, in Neviim (Prophets), and in the non-poetry books of Ketuvim (Writings). You are right. This made me think that the “Right hand of God” is tightly linked to the use of poetry in Tanakh.
To prove this theory, I categorized the books of Tanakh in 3 categories:
- poetry for Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Song, lamentations and Ecclesiastes, for a total of 154 pages
- Visions, i.e. a mix of poetry and reality for the prophets between Isaiah and Malachi, 229 pages
- And Reality/ History, that is everything else, 615 pages.
Based on the number of pages, if the “Right hand of God” had been evenly distributed across Tanakh, there would have been 17 uses in the Reality pages, 6 uses in the Vision pages, and 4 uses in the Poetry pages, pretty much the exact opposite of what I had actually found!
So I ran a regression to correlate the use of the “Right Hand of God” to Reality and to Poetry. The results were illuminating. The use of the “right hand of God” correlated at 85% to the Poetry pages, and at 15% only to the Reality pages (and, by the way, the Vision Pages ended up correlating 90% with Reality and 10% with Poetry).
But then I remembered that two uses in Beshalach were really in the poem of the Song of the Sea. So, when we ran the regression again. This time the use of the “right hand of God” in Tanakh correlated with Poetry 95% of the time!
Therefore, it is clear that the use of the “right hand of God’ is practically only within a poetic context, only a figure of speech, or image.
So, in the end, all uses are figurative. The visions in which Isaiah and Habakkuk saw God’s hand are how he appeared to them in a dream state. Psalms and Lamentations are really poems. Any references to God’s right hand mean that someone is trying to get a point across in a way that can be clearly understood by the reader — which also means that it does not have an anthropomorphic meaning.
But what point are they trying to get across, and what message would the writers expect to convey God’s right hand to be, given their common context with the readers of their society?
Born left-handed 