God’s voice figures prominently early in the Hebrew Bible. He speaks individually to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and Abraham. At Mt. Sinai, God’s voice, in midrash, was heard communally, but was so overwhelming that only the first letter, aleph, was sounded. But in later prophetic books the divine voice grows quieter. Elijah, on Mt. Horeb, is addressed by God (after a whirlwind, a fire, and an earthquake) in what the King James Bible called a “still small voice,” and which, in the original Hebrew (kol demamah dakah), is even more suggestive—literally, “the sound of a slender silence.” By the time we reach the Book of Esther, God’s voice is absent.
Jerome Groopman, “The Voices in our Heads”, The New Yorker (9 January 2017), 71.