HEBREW WORD STUDY – HIDE – SATHAM  סתם  

Deuteronomy 31:18: “And I will surely hide my face in that day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are turned unto other gods.”

There is a story told by Abraham Heschel a Jewish philosopher.  Abraham Heschel  often referred to what he called “divine anthropopathy.”  We speak of God as anthropomorphic, symbolically ascribing to God a human body, but we rarely consider God anthropopathically as having humanlike feelings.  He told the story of Rabbi Dov Baer who was walking on a street accompanied by his disciples and saw a little girl hiding in an alcove, weeping.  “Why are you crying, little girl?” asked the rabbi.  She replied: “I was playing hide-and-seek with my friends, but they didn’t come looking for me!”  Rabbi Dov Baer sighed and said to his students, “In the answer and the tears of that little girl I heard the weeping of the Shekhinah,  ‘and I will surely hide my face.”   I, God, have hidden Myself too, as it were, but no one comes to look for me.”

In ancient times a king would not weep in front of his subjects.  He would turn away or hide Himself so he could weep in private and so as not to show his emotions.  So too in Deuteronomy 31:18, God is not hiding his face so as to punish his people for their evils, he is hiding his face because their evils have cause Him such grief, that he must turn away to weep.  Their evil is having turned to other gods.   God was not good enough for them,  so they committed spiritual adultery and gave themselves to other gods to meet their needs and like a rejected lover, God suffered such hurt that he wept. 

If you look at this verse in the Hebrew you will find the word hide is repeated twice.  Actually, the first time the word hide is written it is written as an infinitive.  In Hebrew, one way to communicate the intensity of a verb is to precede the verb with its own infinitive.  Thus our English translations will render this as “surely hide.”  But a literal reading of this really speaks of twice hiding.  

Certain sages suggest that this means that the hiding is itself hidden. In the first hiding, God has hidden Himself like the little girl playing hide and seek. When we miss his presence we will come searching for Him. As David said in Psalms 30:8 “When you hide yourself, I was terrified.”    When I was a college student I was a reader for a blind student. I remember talking with the student who had been blind since he was six years old and I asked him: “What is like to have been blind for all these years.  He said: “I have not seen the moon in twenty years.”  I remember walking outside that evening and looking up at the moon thinking: “You know, you get used to the moon.”   So too, we get used to the light of God, his presence but when we have to go without it, we realize just how important it was and like David we are terrified and will desperately seek to find his presence.   Like the little girl playing hide-and-seek, she anticipated her friends finding her and experiencing the joy of their reunion.   But when her friends did not seek her, she remained hidden in her hiding.  She remained hidden for another reason, so she could weep over the rejection from her friends. So too, if God removes his presence from us and we do not search for him, this rejection will cause such grief to God that he will hide in His hiding so He may weep. 

The word hide is satham which means to conceal or to keep secret.  The word is spelled Samek, Taw, Final Mem. The Samek in this word would suggest that this concealment or keeping secret is meant for protection or a shelter.   God is hiding his presence to protect Himself from the next letter which is a Taw. The Taw’s shadow is avoiding the risk of intimacy.  His intimacy involves the Final Mem which is His hidden secrets.   We are well aware of the pain of being intimate with someone and then having that person draw away from us. But it is even more painful when you have shared your deep hidden secrets with that person and then to have that person draw away from you.  

If we are made in God’s image, would not God feel the same pain we do by being intimate with us and sharing his hidden secrets with us? Then when we draw away from Him,  in His grief He will, Deuteronomy 31:18, hide his face or presence from us. In that, if we are like David we will be terrified over the loss of His presence and seek it again.  But if we do not seek his presence again He will surely hide or hide His hiddenness so that He may weep over His broken heart.

If you no longer feel God’s presence, you must first determine if He is just hidden so as to draw you to search for Him or is He hiding in His hiddenness so he may weep over His heart which has been broken by us.