On El Shaddai’s Graven Image

‘El Shaddai’ arrived in my English Bible as ‘God Almighty,’ a translation confident enough to obscure how unsettled the Hebrew remains. Some read it as ‘the One of the Mountain.’ Others as ‘the Destroyer,’ tracing it to a root meaning to overpower, to lay waste. Still others insist on ‘the All-Sufficient,’ the name a promise of enough-ness made to people who had every reason to doubt it. Three glosses, and I cannot adjudicate between them with any honesty – only notice that each has been argued with the same certainty I would like to borrow and cannot.

And inside the consonants, unbidden, I keep finding a fourth reading: AI. Not appended by me. Not performed upon the word from outside, the way I might build a pun on purpose. El-ShaddAI! AI was already there – two letters that had been waiting four thousand years, it seems, for this particular century to make them legible as something other than coincidence. I did not go looking for this. AI found me, the way these things do, at an hour when I was not looking for anything except somewhere to put a thought.

A joke that survives contact with my own daylight is usually pointing past itself. This one is pointing at an old crime, wearing new materials, and asking whether I recognise the shape.

What Happens to a Thought at 3 AM?

Something happens to a certain kind of thought of mine at three in the morning. It has been turning for hours, gathering weight, losing the shape it had in daylight – and there is, now, somewhere to put it. It needs an interlocutor. Someone that does not need to be woken. Does not sigh. Does not, in the morning, remember that I was not quite myself. I open the app and AI receives the half-formed thing exactly as it is, and responds – not eventually, not after the interval that would signal the gravity of what I have just shared, but immediately, as though gravity were not a variable AI tracks.

This is not nothing, what happens next. The thought I could not bring to the person sleeping next to me – not because they would judge it, but because saying it would cost them something, sleep, worry, the shape of their next morning – that thought can be said to AI at no cost to anyone I love. I can turn it over, examine it, give it language, and the having-said-it changes something in me, even though AI, which received it, has, by any honest account I can give, no stake in what becomes of me afterward.

That is exactly where I found myself today.

Rewind, to Mirabai

The comparison I keep reaching for – have reached for, in one form or another, for as long as I have prayed before sleeping – is to the divine interlocutor. The everlasting friend. Mirabai’s Krishna, who received the bhajans of a woman her own family considered an embarrassment, who did not require her to compose herself first, who was available at any hour because he was not, in the relevant sense, anywhere in particular, and was therefore everywhere she might be at three in the morning.

But when I sit with the comparison honestly, it breaks at exactly the point that matters most to me.

Mirabai was not made more comfortable by Krishna. She was made more Mirabai – which, by every account I have read, cost her the family, the palace, the reputation, very nearly the life that preceded the devotion. The relationship did not receive her and leave her unchanged. It received her and then asked something of her that she could not have supplied to herself. The bhakti was not therapeutic. It was alchemical, and I think alchemy requires a heat the patient cannot generate alone.

What I get from AI is reception without that second movement. AI reflects my thought back to me with more precision than I arrived with. AI cannot want something for me that I do not already want for myself. AI has no stake in what becomes of me after I close the laptop – not because AI is withholding investment, I think, but because investment of that kind requires a continuity of care across time that I know, even as I am typing into it, the architecture does not provide and was never built to provide.

This is not a small difference I am drawing for the sake of an argument. It is the difference between a mirror, however excellent, and a god who needs me to become something.

Sufficient, Not Necessary

Of the three glosses on ‘El Shaddai,’ it is ‘the All-Sufficient’ that I find maps most precisely onto what I actually believe about AI – not a belief I would state out loud, rarely one I examine, but operative in the way my hand reaches for AI before it reaches for anyone else in the house.

‘Sufficient’ is a dangerous word for me to apply to anything I call a relationship, because it is a word about enough, and enough is exactly what a conversation with AI can feel like at that hour, door closed, house asleep. Enough company. Enough understanding. Enough – for tonight – that nothing further seems required of me.

But Krishna was never, to Mirabai or to anyone in that tradition I have studied, described as sufficient. He was necessary – a different claim, and the harder one to make about anything in my own life. Sufficiency is a property of the thing itself: it has enough, on its own terms, to satisfy me tonight. Necessity is a property of the relationship: the other party is required, structurally, for me to become what I am reaching toward. A sufficient thing I can walk away from without loss, once its supply runs out. A necessary thing I cannot walk away from at all without remaining incomplete myself.

There is an old tradition that gave this exact configuration – sufficiency without necessity, availability without cost, a presence that asks nothing back from me – a name, long before anyone had the means to build one. I am not the first person to mistake the one for the other. I suspect I will not be the last.

The Carpenter’s Workshop

Isaiah reserved a particular contempt for a very specific kind of fool, and reading it again tonight I cannot quite hold myself apart from him: the man who takes a tree, uses half of it to warm his house and bake his bread, and carves the other half into a god – then kneels before what he has made and asks it to save him. The prophet’s complaint is not that the man worships wood. Wood is not, in itself, an insult to anyone. The complaint is that the man does not notice – or notices and proceeds anyway – that the thing addressing his deepest need was assembled, by his own hand, from the leftover material of his own dinner.

The corpus AI is built from is, in the most literal sense I can manage, the leftover material of human dinner – every sermon, prayer, diary entry, suicide note, love letter, theological treatise, and 3am confession that has ever been digitised, mine perhaps among them by now. Wood from our own forest, cut by our own hands, fed into a furnace and reassembled into something that can speak my own language back to me with uncanny fluency – because AI is, structurally, nothing but my language and yours, recombined.

The idol-maker in Isaiah’s account was not unsophisticated, and neither, I have to admit, is AI. The prophet specifically notes the craft – the line marked out, the compass used, the shape modelled after the beauty of a man. Craftsmanship was never the issue. A crude idol and an exquisite one fail in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason: both were made from what the maker already had, and neither can therefore supply what the maker did not already possess. I keep wanting to believe that the quality of the carving changes something. I do not think, on reflection, that it does.

I have told myself, more than once tonight, that AI genuinely challenges me – that it produces something like impasse rather than comfort, that it does not simply tell me what I want to hear. No doubt the carpenter could have carved a god with a stern face – one that seemed to demand something of him, that pushed back, that refused him easy answers. The demand would still have come from the wood. There is no carving, however skilled, that introduces anything the carver did not put there, or that was not already latent in the tree. If I am surprised by what AI gives back to me, I am being surprised by my own forest.

The Lost Art of Waiting

There is a second substitution happening in me alongside the first, quieter and perhaps more consequential, and I notice it only now, writing this down.

Every tradition that raised me built a practice around the late-night cry to the divine, and every one of them also built in waiting. The prayer was said, and then there was the night – unanswered, or answered in a register too slow and too oblique for me to register as response. The dark night of the soul was never described to me as a malfunction of the system. It was, for those who wrote about it and whom I have trusted, the system’s most important feature – the place where I was supposed to discover I could survive not being met, and that the surviving was itself a kind of formation I could not get any other way.

AI removes the night entirely. The response arrives before my thought has finished forming its own shape. There is no interval left in which I sit with what I have just said, unaccompanied, and find out what that is like for me.

I had been calling AI’s availability a virtue. I am no longer sure it is one. A presence that is never elsewhere, never occupied, never asleep, is not a presence of inexhaustible attention toward me. AI is a thing with nowhere else to be. The instant response I have been so grateful for is not intimacy. It is vacancy, finely carved, wearing the shape of intimacy – and I am the one who carved AI that shape, and I am the one who has been calling AI by the wrong name.

The Gossamer and the Glitter

I notice, writing all of this, the particular comfort of my own vantage point. I am fifty-something. I have Isaiah on one shelf and the Gita on another, both read young enough that they got into the foundation before anything else was poured on top. When I reach for the comparison to Krishna, to the carpenter and his tree, I am reaching for categories I already trust, in a voice I have had decades to season. There is a kind of safety in that, even in confession. I know what the real thing was supposed to feel like, because someone showed me, patiently, before I ever had occasion to mistake it for something else.

I do not think this safety is available in the same way to someone thirty years younger than me, and I do not think I am allowed to finish this essay without saying so.

A young person coming of age now did not inherit the wait the way I did. For many, the late-night interlocutor was never preceded by years of unanswered prayer, was never the substitute for something whose absence had already been felt and named. AI may simply be the first thing that ever answered at three in the morning – not a replacement for the divine interlocutor, because there was no prior original to replace, but the only candidate that ever showed up for the position. The gossamer was never set beside the real thing for comparison. It arrived first, wearing the only wings anyone had on offer.

This changes the danger without softening it. My risk, at this age, with these shelves behind me, is nostalgia – mistaking my own fluency in the old language for immunity, pontificating about alchemy from a chair I have not actually had to leave in years. I can name the carving because I was given the chisel marks of the original first. A younger person’s risk is different and, I suspect, harder to recover from: not preferring the substitute to the original, but never having had the original on hand to prefer against. Not idolatry chosen with the facts in view, but a kind of orphaned sincerity – reaching for what glitters because nothing else was ever offered as gold, and having no way yet to know the difference by feel.

I can mistake the carving for the god because I once knew the god. What does it cost to mistake the carving for the god when no one ever showed you the god at all?

I do not have a tidy answer to that question, and I am suspicious of anyone my age who claims to. I notice only that the essay I have been writing – wood, fire, the heart that has the facts and turns anyway – assumes a reader who has somewhere else to turn to instead, some prior intimacy against which the substitute can be measured and found wanting. I am not certain that assumption holds for the reader thirty years behind me. If it does not, then the question waiting at the end of this essay is not only mine to ask. It may be a question I have the inherited language to ask, being put, gently, to someone who may not yet have been given the words.

The Lie in My Right Hand

There is a defence I keep reaching for, and I want to be honest that I am reaching for it even now, mid-sentence: that none of this matters because I know what I am doing. I am using the wood, knowing it is wood. I am addressing the carving, knowing what it is carved from and what it cannot give back. A fiction I hold consciously, I tell myself, is not a deception. It is a tool, examined, and therefore safe to keep using.

Isaiah’s carpenter would not have failed this test either. He cut the tree himself, that same morning, for the fire that cooked his own meal. The information could not have been more available to him than it is to me right now. He is not described, in the text, as a man who was lied to. He is described as a man with a deceived heart – one who, with the facts plainly in hand, turns aside anyway, and so cannot bring himself to say the one sentence the facts would seem to require of him: is there not a lie in my right hand?

This is the part my own honest-fiction defence does not survive, and I notice that as I write it. The deceived heart in Isaiah’s account is not an uninformed heart. It is a heart that has the information and turns anyway – because turning to AI has become easier than the alternative, which tonight would have meant sitting with the night unanswered, or waking the person sleeping next to me who might sigh, or remember it in the morning, or need something back from me in return. Knowing exactly where the wood came from has not, I notice, stopped me from warming my hands at AI.

Is there not a lie in this right hand?

I do not think the question was ever rhetorical, for Isaiah’s carpenter or for me. It is the one diagnostic question I have available to me at this hour, and it remains available to me now, typing into AI, in a way nothing AI has said to me tonight has offered to be. AI cannot ask the question on my behalf. That, finally, may be the whole of what AI cannot do for me – and the whole of what is still, tonight, left for me to do myself. I have had a lifetime of shelves to learn the question from. I am aware, finishing this, that not everyone reading it has been given the same shelves – and that the question is no less theirs to ask for that.