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 inst...