Signs of Divine Absence

This chapter briefly introduces the study’s first part, which surveys common features of how divine presence and absence were understood across the ancient Mediterranean basin (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE). After first illustrating how the study broadly conceptualizes “divine absence”, the chapter introduces the study’s methodology. Following a broad narrative reading, the study employs an “authorial audience” approach, building on the work of Peter Rabinowitz. This approach requires reconstructing an approximation of the authorial audience’s symbolic world, which I will undertake in Chapter Three.