It was these celestial and terrestrial phenomena wliich suggested to the Jew the conception of the Sliekinah. The desideratum was to find some- tliiug which is Divine but is not God. God was very far away ; literally ' beyond all knowledge and all thought ' : yet He rules the world mediately, if not immediately ; and being a monotlieist the Jew could not let go his belief — that only that which is Divine can rule the world. This, then, was the problem ; to discover a mediator, or medi- ators. Divine, but not God. How can this be made thinkable? Well, the wind (ruah) is the breath of God, whether in the zephyr or the storm ; and if so, it is Divine. So thought the Jew ; and in course of time the ruah, which first meant 'breath' or 'wind,' was supposed to be endowed with the attributes of God — power, wisdom, holiness — and then 'spirit' becomes its more appropriate rendering. God's ruah is thus Divine — an ettluence from Deitj' — and is thus fitted to be intermediary between God and the world of nature and man. Further, there was the Divine Word. The sacred Hebrew books assigned great importance to Divine utterances or words. ' God said, " Let light be" ; and light was' (Gn P). It was a peculiarity of the ancient world to ascribe causal efliciency to an uttered word, as is seen in the potencj' ascribed to magical formulie. When later Judaism exjiounded such passages as the one we have just quoted, it assigned to the uttered word a causal etticacy in the physical realm. The very words ' Let there be light ' were to them a vera causa in the natural sphere, and were instrumental in causing the light to come into being ; as Zee 5* speaks of an uttered ' curse '
entering a house and ' consuming its timbers and its stones.' An utterance of God is something Divine : as potent as God Himself, and therefore ' Word ' lends itself to Jewish philosophy as a suitable expression for a Divine intermediary between God and the world. This helps us to understand how Judaism came to its conception of the Sliekinah. The glory in the storm-cloud, in and over the tabernacle, is a manifestation of God. The brilliance is not God ; for it was a matter of fixed Jewish belief that God is invisible, and yet the brilliance is an effluence from Deity. When the Jew had banished God from his universe, the recorded manifestation of- the Divine Presence in the ark and elsewhere seemed to him a tcriium quid between God and Nature : Divine, but separable in thought from God.
The word Shekinah is used very often in the Jewish Tar^ums. It does not indicate the radi- ance or brilliance, but the central cause of the radiance. This centre was conceived to be Divine. The Heb. Scriptures often speak of ' the glory ' of the Lord, but, with one exception (Zee 2"), the Tar- gnmists never use the word Shekinah to translate the Heb. word for 'glory.' They understood tuj to be the ett'ulgence of the substantial glory, i.e. of the Shekinah. The Shekinah is used in the Targiims as the equivalent for the Divine Being, not for His glory. A good illustration of this occurs in Is 60^ where the Heb. reads, ' The LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee,' and the Targ. renders, 'In thee the Shekinah of the LORD shall dwell, and his glory shall be revealed upon thee.' Whenever the Heb. text would seem to impose any limitations of space upon God, the Targ. substitutes for ' God,' ' his Shekinah.' In every instance where God is said to dwell in a place, the Targ. renders that God ' causes his Shekinah to dwell ' there (Gn 9-"', Ex 25« 29-^, 1 K 6's 8'^ Zee 8«). Every expression which w ould in any sense localize God, is scrupu- lously altered by all the Targumists, who believed that the Shekinah can be localized, but not the omnipresent God. When Jacob says (Gn 28'*), 'God is in this place,' Targ. renders, 'The glory of the Shekinah of J" is in this place.' So Ilab 2^ 'The Lord is in his holy temple,' becomes 'J' was pleased to cause his Shekinah to dwell,' 410. When J" is said to ' sit upon the cherubim ' (1 S 4*, 2 S 6-) the Targ. must needs read, ' the Shekinah of J"' for 'J'": and Jerusalem is the place where J" causes His Shekinah to dwell (1 K 8'" '" 14'", Ps 74-). Similarly, when the Heb. text says that any one saio God, or that God appeared to any one, the Targ. can only permit the glory of the Shekinah of J" to be visible to mortal man (Is 6' ' My eves have seen the glory of the Shekinah of the King of the world' ; cf. Ex 3", Ezk 1', Lv 9*).
The Targumist even shrinks from saying that J" is or dwells in heaven. The Heaven of Heavens cannot contain God ; and therefore it is not God, but His Shekinah, which can be localized, even in heaven. Is 33' ' He dwelleth on high,' becomes in Targ. ' He has placed his Shekinah in the lofty heaven ' (cf. Is 32" SS'*). In Dt 4» ' J " is God in heaven above and on earth beneath,' Onlf. renders 'God, whose Shekinah is (Targ. Jerus. ' dwells ') in heaven above, and who rules on earth beneath ' ; so Dt 3^.