in theology’s toolkit. But Jews and Christians alike15 take it for granted that the analogy between God and “a speaker of words” is neither arbitrary nor inappropriate, but grounded in and validated by what objectively occurs. The Creator may justifiably be said, and be expected, to speak, by dint of having been discovered to do precisely that. To recognize human speakers—the Lawgiver, for example, or the Prophets, or Jesus of Nazareth—as those who in their words and their own persons mediate or