Acts 1:24, Psalm 44:21, and Psalm 139:2-3 affirm that God knows the secrets of the heart, that He understands thoughts from afar, that nothing in human consciousness is hidden from Him. But Deuteronomy 8:2, 13:3, and 2 Chronicles 32:31 describe God testing or 'proving' people specifically *to know* what is in their hearts — implying He didn't already know. Either God is omniscient about human hearts or He uses tests to learn what's in them.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Yes.
And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which knowest the
hearts of all men. Acts 1:24
He knoweth the secrets of the heart. Psalm 44:21
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou
understands my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying
down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Psalm 139:2-3
2You know my sitting down and my rising up. You perceive my thoughts from afar.3You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
2You shall remember all the way which Yahweh your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, to test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.
3you shall not listen to the words of that prophet, or to that dreamer of dreams; for Yahweh your God is testing you, to know whether you love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
31However concerning the ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent to him to inquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The contradiction sets omniscience-affirming texts (Acts 1:24, "knowest the hearts of all men"; Ps 44:21, "he knoweth the secrets of the heart"; Ps 139:2-3, "thou understandest my thought afar off") against texts in which God tests people "to know" what is in their hearts (Deut 8:2; 13:3; 2 Chron 32:31). The latter use language implying that the testing supplies information God did not already possess.
The standard apologetic harmonization, articulated by Grudem's Systematic Theology and developed in Bruce Ware's work on classical theism, distinguishes God's exhaustive knowledge from the *demonstration* or *manifestation* of what He already knows. God does not test Israel to acquire information but so that Israel will know its own heart, or so the test manifests in history what is eternally known to God. The "to know" language is anthropomorphic accommodation—scripture speaking of God in human terms—and the harmonization has been the standard answer since Augustine. There is genuine intracanonical support for the accommodation hermeneutic: scripture frequently ascribes human features to God (eyes, hands, repenting, walking), and few read those literally.
The difficulty is that the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 8:2 resists the accommodation read on its own terms. The verb is *la-da'at*, the infinitive construct of *yada'* ("to know") governed by the purpose preposition—"in order to know what was in thine heart." The grammar presents the testing as serving an epistemic function for Yahweh, not merely a pedagogical one for Israel. Tigay's JPS Deuteronomy notes the natural reading is that the older Hebrew theology did not presuppose the exhaustive, eternal omniscience that later Hellenistic-Jewish and Christian theology developed. The pattern recurs across the older Pentateuchal strata: in Genesis 18:21 Yahweh says of Sodom, "I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it... and if not, I will know"; in Genesis 22:12, after the Akedah, the angel says "now I know that thou fearest God"—the temporal "now" marking a gain in knowledge contingent on Abraham's action. The 2 Chronicles 32:31 notice that God "left" Hezekiah "to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart" sits in the same idiom.
Mark Smith and Benjamin Sommer have documented at length how the early Israelite deity is conceived as embodied, anthropomorphic, and spatially located in ways incompatible with the philosophically perfect God of later theology: Yahweh walks in the garden "in the cool of the day" (Gen 3:8) and "comes down" to investigate Babel (Gen 11:5) and Sodom (Gen 18:21). Brueggemann and Crenshaw extend the point to the epistemic dimension—Yahweh uses tests to gain knowledge. The omniscience-affirming verses, by contrast, cluster in poetic-hymnic and later or post-exilic contexts (Ps 139, Ps 44, the Lukan Acts 1:24) where the philosophical conception of God has matured. The contradiction is thus between two strata of biblical theology, not merely two surface verses.
The accommodation argument works only if one assumes the doctrine of omniscience was already in place when Deuteronomy 8 was written and the author was speaking metaphorically. The critical reconstruction reverses the order: divine omniscience is a later development, and Deuteronomy 8, like Genesis 18 and 22, means what its grammar says. Crenshaw's A Whirlpool of Torment and Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament both treat this kind of internal tension as evidence of theological development across the canon.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction rooted in the development of the doctrine of God; the accommodation reading is a later theological overlay, not the plain sense of the testing texts.
Sources for this reading
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Zondervan, 1994) on divine omniscience and testing
Bruce A. Ware, God's Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith (Crossway, 2004) on divine foreknowledge
Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; JPS, 1996) on Deuteronomy 8:2 and 13:3Deuteronomy 8:2, Deuteronomy 13:3
Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford University Press, 2001) on the anthropomorphic deity
Benjamin D. Sommer, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Fortress, 1997)
James L. Crenshaw, A Whirlpool of Torment (Fortress, 1984)
Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part 2 (FOTL XV; Eerdmans, 2001) on Psalm 139:2-3Psalms 139:2-3
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The contradiction sets omniscience-affirming texts (Acts 1:24, "knowest the hearts of all men"; Ps 44:21, "he knoweth the secrets of the heart"; Ps 139:2-3, "thou understandest my thought afar off") against texts in which God tests people "to know" what is in their hearts (Deut 8:2; 13:3; 2 Chron 32:31). The latter use language implying that the testing supplies information God did not already possess.
The standard apologetic harmonization, articulated by Grudem's Systematic Theology and developed in Bruce Ware's work on classical theism, distinguishes God's exhaustive knowledge from the *demonstration* or *manifestation* of what He already knows. God does not test Israel to acquire information but so that Israel will know its own heart, or so the test manifests in history what is eternally known to God. The "to know" language is anthropomorphic accommodation—scripture speaking of God in human terms—and the harmonization has been the standard answer since Augustine. There is genuine intracanonical support for the accommodation hermeneutic: scripture frequently ascribes human features to God (eyes, hands, repenting, walking), and few read those literally.
The difficulty is that the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 8:2 resists the accommodation read on its own terms. The verb is *la-da'at*, the infinitive construct of *yada'* ("to know") governed by the purpose preposition—"in order to know what was in thine heart." The grammar presents the testing as serving an epistemic function for Yahweh, not merely a pedagogical one for Israel. Tigay's JPS Deuteronomy notes the natural reading is that the older Hebrew theology did not presuppose the exhaustive, eternal omniscience that later Hellenistic-Jewish and Christian theology developed. The pattern recurs across the older Pentateuchal strata: in Genesis 18:21 Yahweh says of Sodom, "I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it... and if not, I will know"; in Genesis 22:12, after the Akedah, the angel says "now I know that thou fearest God"—the temporal "now" marking a gain in knowledge contingent on Abraham's action. The 2 Chronicles 32:31 notice that God "left" Hezekiah "to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart" sits in the same idiom.
Mark Smith and Benjamin Sommer have documented at length how the early Israelite deity is conceived as embodied, anthropomorphic, and spatially located in ways incompatible with the philosophically perfect God of later theology: Yahweh walks in the garden "in the cool of the day" (Gen 3:8) and "comes down" to investigate Babel (Gen 11:5) and Sodom (Gen 18:21). Brueggemann and Crenshaw extend the point to the epistemic dimension—Yahweh uses tests to gain knowledge. The omniscience-affirming verses, by contrast, cluster in poetic-hymnic and later or post-exilic contexts (Ps 139, Ps 44, the Lukan Acts 1:24) where the philosophical conception of God has matured. The contradiction is thus between two strata of biblical theology, not merely two surface verses.
The accommodation argument works only if one assumes the doctrine of omniscience was already in place when Deuteronomy 8 was written and the author was speaking metaphorically. The critical reconstruction reverses the order: divine omniscience is a later development, and Deuteronomy 8, like Genesis 18 and 22, means what its grammar says. Crenshaw's A Whirlpool of Torment and Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament both treat this kind of internal tension as evidence of theological development across the canon.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction rooted in the development of the doctrine of God; the accommodation reading is a later theological overlay, not the plain sense of the testing texts.
Sources for this reading