Scriptor Ignotus's Reviews > God: An Anatomy

It is axiomatic to each of the Abrahamic faiths that God has no body. Centuries of liturgical tradition, theological reflection, philosophical disputation, and historical disruption have polished away, as best they can, any trace of particularity or compositeness in the God of the Bible, bringing the divine patron of Israel into alignment with the immaterial and utterly transcendent Absolute conceptualized by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Platonism. God can’t be a thing, say the theologians, because otherwise He would be just one thing among all the others, and could thus not be the unconditioned foundation of being itself; god would not be God. To whatever extent God was anthropomorphized by the Biblical writers, they say, this was either the product of an insufficient but developing understanding of the true nature of divinity, or else it represented a concession to the limitations of their hearers, using bodily analogies to disclose supernatural truths.

But this heavily metaphorized and intellectualized reading of scripture, so instinctually favored by Jews and Christians, is inevitably post-Biblical. It is an imposition on the Biblical texts by a later theological tradition, not a reflection of the religious understanding of the Biblical authors themselves. The latter related to their God in ways that were inescapably anatomical and interpersonal. Their God was a supersized humanoid being; one Who was only selectively visible to the worthiest of mortals, often wreathing Himself in storm clouds or compelling His worshippers to divert their gaze with His brilliant, luminescent aura, but Who was no less corporeal as a result. This was a God Who led His people into battle; Who swore oaths and made covenants with them, Who shared meals and prayed with them, Who participated in their sacrifices, walked with them, fought with them, stalked through their camps in the night; Who baited and snared the thalassic chaos monster that terrorized the peoples of the ancient near east for centuries; Who boasted an enormous appetite for food and sex commensurate with His outsized body; and Who held court from His cherubic throne in the sanctuary of Solomon’s temple: not only in the ethereal visions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, but also likely in the form of a cult statue that a few sanctified visitors could glimpse through a haze of incense and a darkness meagerly abated by lamplight.

Before He became identified with God, this deity even had a proper name: YHWH. Because the Hebrew language lacks vowels, and because from the third century BC, under the influence of Hellenism and the religious revaluation that followed the Babylonian Captivity, it became increasingly taboo to utter the Divine Name, it is unknown with any certainty how this name was pronounced—“Yahweh” is the best guess. The mere fact that the Biblical God has a proper name indicates His historical provincialism. The religious landscape of the bronze age levant was henotheistic: it contained a broad assortment of tutelary deities, overseen by a supreme god named El. This is illustrated by an ancient pericope found in Deuteronomy 32:8-9:

“When Elyon [“the Most High”] apportioned the nations,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God [or “divine sons”].
But YHWH’s [“the Lord’s”] portion is his people,
Jacob [Israel] his allotted heritage.”

Before the turn of the first millennium BC, the Israelites and Judahites likely venerated El as the head of their pantheon. The patriarchs of Genesis typically pay obeisance not to Yahweh, but to El Shaddai, a term typically translated as “God Almighty”, but which probably means something more like “El of the wilderness”, referring to a localized manifestation of the supreme god. The name Isra-el is also very telling, as it uses the name of El, rather than Yahweh, as its divine suffix. Yahweh was a bellicose storm god from the southern wildlands of Edom. With the emergence of monarchy in Israel and Judah in the early first millennium BC, Yahweh, sufficiently warlike to become patron of the new kings, gradually supplanted El as the chief deity. Having inherited El’s mantle, Yahweh also inherited many of his characteristics, including his anthroformity, as well as those of other near eastern divinities; and this legacy manifests itself abundantly within the Biblical texts.

So what was this humanoid God like? His feet were always firmly rooted in His sacred places; whether on a platform of lapis lazuli, as on His holy mountain (Ex. 24:10); or else on His footstool, the Ark of the Covenant, in the temple sanctuary (Ps. 99:1-5), where He sat enthroned, like other gods and kings, on the wings of golden cherubim. After the Babylonian Captivity of the sixth century BC, Yahweh’s stature only grew, and His throne became more elevated. He now sat on a crystalline platform borne aloft in the heavens by cherubim and spinning wheels (Ezekiel 1:4-28), and the whole world became His footstool (Is. 66:1).

Despite the bashfulness of the Biblical authors, and in defiance of the discomfort of later traditions with ascribing human sexuality to God, Yahweh was famed for His virility; and His relations with His one-time consort Asherah, and with Israel, are described with strong sexual implications. Yahweh was perhaps conceived of with a set of genitals befitting both the size of His body and the divine, creative, and life-giving capacities ascribed to the phallus by other near eastern mythologies, which likewise endowed their creating gods, like El, Enki, and Min, with large and cosmically-generative penises. “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lofty!” says Isaiah. “His shul filled the temple!” The Hebrew word shul, typically translated as “skirt” or “robe”, is used elsewhere in the scriptures (Jeremiah 13:22, Nahum 3:5) to refer obliquely to the exposure of the genitalia. Stavrakopoulou suggests that this is why the seraphim cover their “feet” with their wings, much as Ruth uncovered the “feet” of Boaz in a story that is also commonly given a sexual gloss. Maybe so; but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Nonetheless, there is no denying the sexual intensity of God’s pledge to marry Israel in Hosea:

“. . . I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD.
And in that day I will fructify, declares the LORD,

I will fructify the heavens,
and they shall fructify the earth,
and the earth shall fructify the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall fructify Jezreel [literally, “he seeds”],
and I will sow her for myself in the land.” (Hosea 2:18-23)

Nor the disturbing sexual violence, metaphorical or not, that He threatened on a “whoring” Israel, imagined as a young woman, in Ezekiel 16:

“. . . I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from every side and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness . . . And I will give you into their hands, and they shall throw down your vaulted chamber and break down your lofty places. They shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful jewels and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a crowd against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. And they shall burn your houses and execute judgments upon you in the sight of many women. I will make you stop playing the whore . . .” — (Ezekiel 16:37-41)

The one-time status of Asherah as a consort of Yahweh who was often venerated alongside Him in His temples is attested both by the archaeological record and by the fact that the Deuteronomist explicitly warns his readers not to do it (Deut. 16:21). There is also a trace of Asherah’s former presence near the end of Genesis, when Jacob makes a prayer for Joseph:

“. . . the blessings of Heaven above,
The blessings of Deep crouching below;
The blessings of Breasts-and-Womb,
The blessings of your Father, warrior Most High . . .” — (Genesis 49:25-26)

The formulation of “Breasts-and-Womb” was also applied to Athirat, an older version of Asherah, in the Syrian city of Ugarit.

Yahweh ate with his worshippers when they made sacrifices to Him, taking the choice portions for Himself and leaving the rest for His priests, simultaneously communing with mortals and distinguishing Himself from them. When the waters of the great flood receded and Noah offered a great sacrifice upon leaving the ark, it was the sweet aroma of the roasting meat that stilled Yahweh’s wrath:

“And when YHWH smelled the pleasing aroma, YHWH said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.’” —(Genesis 8:21)

Yahweh’s arm was so powerful that with it He turned Leviathan from an awesome chaos demon into a pet to play with (Ps. 104:26). His physical form was said to be exceptionally beautiful, as a passage from the Song of Songs, which may have described a cult statue, attests:

“My beloved is radiant and ruddy,
Standing out among ten thousand.
His head is gold, pure gold,
His locks are curls,
Black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves,
By watercourses,
Bathed in milk,
Fitly set.
His cheeks, like beds of spices,
Pouring forth perfumes.
His lips are lilies,
Dripping liquid myrrh.
His arms are rounded gold,
Inlaid with jewels.
His genitalia are fine-worked ivory,
With inlaid lapis lazuli.
His legs are alabaster columns,
Set upon bases of gold.
Like Lebanon is his look,
Choice as the cedars.
His mouth is sweet,
And all of him desirable.” —(Song of Songs 5:10-16)

Like El, Yahweh was often depicted with horns protruding from His head, symbolizing his taurine strength and ferocity, and often used to scatter His enemies. Through Moses, He imparts these horns to Joseph:

“Let them come on the head of Joseph,
On the brow of the head of the prince among his brothers!
The firstborn of his Bull – majesty is his!
His horns are the horns of a wild ox;
With them he gores peoples,
Driving them to the ends of the earth!” — (Deuteronomy 33:16-17)

In 1 Kings, the king Jeroboam creates two “calves”, or divine bulls, to represent Yahweh, while the prophet Zedekiah wore a horned headdress to reenact God’s aforementioned promise to Joseph that He would scatter and gore the Syrian armies. This identification of Yahweh with the sacred bull was evidently a great source of irritation for the post-exilic scribal elite, which likely explains the inclusion of the infamous "golden calf" in the Exodus story.

While I don’t think most Christians would recognize Stavrakopoulou’s concluding assertion that the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ somehow led to an excessively dematerialized understanding of God (quite the contrary, in fact); and while certain passages of this book either stretch the bounds of plausibility or are cringingly “woke”, this is nonetheless an engaging, and at times fascinating, read.