In the Hebrew Bible, literary patterns of revelation and concealment are based on humanity's initial encounter with God in the Garden of Eden. God asks the question "Where are you?" Adam and Eve reveal themselves by articulating their concealment behind the fig leaf. This paradox effects their exile from Eden, and their progeny must henceforth mediate this paradox in their future verbal intercourse with God. / It is the intention of this work to suggest how in certain textual passages, this paradox is defined and structured according to a literary dichotomy of language and silence. After the exile, biblical characters proclaim their presence before God by uttering a password ("Here I am") which is, in effect, an existential utterance of dialogic reconstruction. Through various literary devices, I hope to show how this "vertical" dialogue is re-established by Adam and Eve's progeny, and how the biblical narrator(s) uses language to show silence as a "phenomenon" of the word.

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