While the wicked seem to get away with everything, it appears as if God is unconscious of their disobedience, their violence and their arrogance. God, of course, neither slumbers nor sleeps. He will be (metaphorically) like a man who wakes up and gets going. So Asaph remarks that God’s present apparent inactivity regarding the wicked will vanish as soon as He pays attention to them. You have to wake up before you can do something. When Asaph uses this word, he merely notices that no action in the world occurs when one dreams. All of the contemporary hubbub about God revealing His plans in dreams (and visions) smacks of pagan magic, not Scriptural occurrences. Unlike many pagan cultures, dreams are not looked upon as pathways to the gods. But, no, there is no development of dreams as some sort of tool for understanding the divine world. Yes, there is a difference between ordinary dreams and the ones God uses. Yes, God does communicate through dreams. We know this because the Tanakh contains no explicit theory about dreams or psychic states with religious significance. The Hebrew word halom (dream) has a decidedly different use in the Tanakh than similar concepts in other ancient near-Eastern languages and cultures.

Psalm 73:20 Hebrew World translationĭream – Ah, so you didn’t realize that Frank Herbert employed Hebrew thinking, did you? Well, maybe it was just an accident (really?). As a dream when one awakes, so O Lord, when you awake, you shall despise their image.

The sleeper must awaken