A slave girl. A boy who kept answering the wrong person. A prophet who told God to his face that he had been tricked.

Most of us have heard about God for years. We know the stories. And somewhere underneath is the suspicion that all of it is secondhand — that it happened to other people, a long time ago, and not to us.

Nineteen people in the Bible crossed that line. This book is what they said when they did.

Not the tidy version. Abraham tells God a course of action would be beneath him, then talks a number down from fifty to ten while apologising for asking. Hannah prays with no sound coming out, and the priest assumes she is drunk. Jeremiah says you talked me into this, then curses the day he was born — and the chapter ends there, with no reply.

None of them is rebuked for how they said it. And almost none of them gets what they asked for.

What they get instead is him.

Nineteen chapters, arranged by the position a person is speaking from. Each one ends with a single line short enough to say out loud.

'I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.' — Job 42:5

19 People Who Talked to God: How they said it, and what came back

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