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Tim Preston's Reviews > God: An Anatomy
God: An Anatomy
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'If cattle or horses had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each have themselves...the Ethiopians say that their gods are broad-nosed and dark-skinned, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.'
Xenophanes of Colophon, circa 500 B.C.
Interesting book. By reference to the Old Testament (Tanakh to Jews) and Ancient Middle Eastern myths and religions, all of which came out of the same World, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou traces how an Ancient Levantine sky god, Yahweh, in origin the son of former Supreme deity El, once conceived of as part of a pagan pantheon, with, like other gods of the time, a physical, humanlike body, a wife, cult statues and animal sacrifices, developed over many centuries in human imagination into the largely disembodied, abstract, one true God of Christians and Jews today.
Had He not done so, it would have been harder for the Christian idea of the Trinity, a God who is both Three beings and One, to take hold, as it is easier to believe such abstractions of a God who transcends a physical body.
However, once God ceased to have a body, Man ceased to be, as the Bible says, made in God's image.
The authoress, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, now of Exeter University, sets this out in a lot of detail, so before buying this book it is worth viewing some of the talks and interviews she gave about it on YouTube, to check that you find what she has to say on this subject as interesting as I do. These include on the Digital Hammurabi Channel with Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis, but there are others.
Chapters of this book trace ancient ideas of God's body, starting with His feet, working all the way up through legs, arms etc. to His head (He was said to have a handsome face and hair).
There are Chapters on the Divine genitals. The only detail about Jesus's body in the New Testament is that he was circumcised.
Historically, Rabbis taught that Yahweh/ the Lord (God the Father to Christians) is circumcised. He apparently always has been, as there is no tradition of who circumcised him or what happened to the Holy Foreskin. In contrast Jesus (God the Son to Christians)' supposed circumcised foreskin was for centuries a venerated relic in Roman Catholic Christianity, until stolen in 1983 and never recovered.
In the oldest Hebrew traditions, preserved, mixed with later, different, ones, in the Old Testament, Yahweh has physical feet that stride across the landscape.
By comparison, an ancient pagan temple in Syria, sadly destroyed by bombing by the Turkish air force in fighting a few years ago, has giant footprints of some forgotten pagan god carved into its stone steps to show the deity entering the temple, but no such footprints leave it, implying the god took up permanent residence inside.
In the earlier parts of the Bible, Yahweh had a booming voice and physical breath. In Biblical Hebrew, the same word meant both breath and spirit, seen as the same thing, as both left the body on death. Near the beginning of Genesis when, in most translations, 'The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters' of the new Earth, that is God's breath.
The authoress believes that, like other Ancient gods, Yahweh once had statues worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem and elsewhere, until these were looted by the Assyrians and Babylonians when they conquered Israel and Judah.
During the Captivity in Babylon, following this defeat, the Jewish elite had to learn to practice their religion without such images. They eventually came to believe that such 'idolatrous' practices were why the Lord had punished them by letting their land fall to foreign invaders. Hence several Books of what became the Bible, written round that time, not only condemn idolatry, but play down the extent that it was ever part of the religion of their ancestors.
The authoress, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, does not believe in religion, but she is not a Richard Dawkins type militant atheist. Of Greek ancestry (although she grew up in Britain), from an early age familiar with Myths of Ancient Greek gods, who were usually imagined with humanlike bodies, desires and emotions, she wanted to know if the God of Christianity and Judaism was ever like that, and how He became so different.
This book was first published in 2021, close to the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, which in a few places shows. As normal for academics these days, Professor Stavrakopoulou is Politically Correct.
She says 'Hebrew Bible' rather than privilege Christianity by calling it the Old Testament, and 'South-West Asia' - rather than 'Colonial' terms 'Middle East' or 'Near East'. She uses BCE/CE dates - referring to a meaningless 'Common Era' rather than BC/AD. The cover of the UK paperback edition quotes admiring reviews from arch Religious Wets Rowan Williams and Karen Armstrong. However, don't let any of that put you off reading 'God An Anatomy'.
A sample of other points I learned from this book:
-King Tutankhamen of Egypt had sandals inlaid with pictures on the upper soles showing foreign enemies of Egypt, so he could literally walk on his enemies.
-In Hosea 2.14-15 and Ezekial 16.7-8 God sounds downright lecherous wanting to enjoy the body of Israel, seen as a maiden, and possesively demands fidelity from her.
-By 500 BC, Yahweh worship had become exclusive. The Bible dismisses all other gods as 'gillulim' which translators usually render 'idols' but is literally 'Faeces Gods' (Professor Stavrakopoulou uses a cruder word than 'faeces' here).
-Ezekial 28.17 has the story of a King of Tyre who lived in the Garden of Eden until God cast him out for thinking himself a god. The authoress believes this predates Genesis and is an older version of what developed into the story of Adam and Eve, evicted from Eden for eating a forbidden fruit they think will make them 'like gods'.
-Exodus 34 says Moses was in the presence of God on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights. It troubled later Rabbis that Moses might during that time have 'gone to the lavatory', if I can put it like that, in the presence of God, which to them would be blasphemous, so they came up with explanations as how Moses could go 40 days and nights without needing to answer the call of nature.
-Deuteronomy 34.6 literally says that after Moses died, God personally buried Moses' body. This bothered later Rabbis, as contact with a corpse would have made God, according to his own laws, ritually impure. Hence Rabbis and even Christian translators tend to say vaguely that Moses 'was buried', but not who buried him.
-The earliest myth of the invention of writing is Sumerian, from around 2,000 BC, when the Priest-Kings of the cities of Kullab (later called Uruk) and Anatta quarreled, through messengers, about refurbishing a temple of Inanna. They exchanged increasingly complicated arguments that their messengers had to memorise, until the arguments became too long and complex for the messengers to remember, so King Emmarkar of Kullab invented writing on clay tablets.
-In another Sumerian myth, slightly echoed in the later Greek story of Prometheus, the god Enki hoarded the gifts of writing, carpentry, metalwork, weaponry, leather work, prostitution, textile production, love making, brewing, basketweaving and decision making, which, to the Sumerians, constituted the arts of civilisation, in an underwater temple. The goddess Inanna wanted to give these gifts to the city of Uruk, and persuaded Enki, when he was drunk, to let her take them, which she stowed in her boat. Enki, once sober, changed his mind and Inanna had to battle through storms and sea monsters Enki sent to stop her, but Inanna eventually succeeded in delivering all these gifts to Uruk, and thus to humanity.
*****
In the Acknowledgements at the end of God An Anatomy, the writer thanks a list of her 'clever friends', who 'all made their mark on this book', including 'Natalie Haynes'. I assume that is the Natalie Haynes who 'Stands Up for the Classics' on BBC Radio 4, author of 'A Thousand Ships', which I also reviewed on Goodreads.
Xenophanes of Colophon, circa 500 B.C.
Interesting book. By reference to the Old Testament (Tanakh to Jews) and Ancient Middle Eastern myths and religions, all of which came out of the same World, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou traces how an Ancient Levantine sky god, Yahweh, in origin the son of former Supreme deity El, once conceived of as part of a pagan pantheon, with, like other gods of the time, a physical, humanlike body, a wife, cult statues and animal sacrifices, developed over many centuries in human imagination into the largely disembodied, abstract, one true God of Christians and Jews today.
Had He not done so, it would have been harder for the Christian idea of the Trinity, a God who is both Three beings and One, to take hold, as it is easier to believe such abstractions of a God who transcends a physical body.
However, once God ceased to have a body, Man ceased to be, as the Bible says, made in God's image.
The authoress, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, now of Exeter University, sets this out in a lot of detail, so before buying this book it is worth viewing some of the talks and interviews she gave about it on YouTube, to check that you find what she has to say on this subject as interesting as I do. These include on the Digital Hammurabi Channel with Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis, but there are others.
Chapters of this book trace ancient ideas of God's body, starting with His feet, working all the way up through legs, arms etc. to His head (He was said to have a handsome face and hair).
There are Chapters on the Divine genitals. The only detail about Jesus's body in the New Testament is that he was circumcised.
Historically, Rabbis taught that Yahweh/ the Lord (God the Father to Christians) is circumcised. He apparently always has been, as there is no tradition of who circumcised him or what happened to the Holy Foreskin. In contrast Jesus (God the Son to Christians)' supposed circumcised foreskin was for centuries a venerated relic in Roman Catholic Christianity, until stolen in 1983 and never recovered.
In the oldest Hebrew traditions, preserved, mixed with later, different, ones, in the Old Testament, Yahweh has physical feet that stride across the landscape.
By comparison, an ancient pagan temple in Syria, sadly destroyed by bombing by the Turkish air force in fighting a few years ago, has giant footprints of some forgotten pagan god carved into its stone steps to show the deity entering the temple, but no such footprints leave it, implying the god took up permanent residence inside.
In the earlier parts of the Bible, Yahweh had a booming voice and physical breath. In Biblical Hebrew, the same word meant both breath and spirit, seen as the same thing, as both left the body on death. Near the beginning of Genesis when, in most translations, 'The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters' of the new Earth, that is God's breath.
The authoress believes that, like other Ancient gods, Yahweh once had statues worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem and elsewhere, until these were looted by the Assyrians and Babylonians when they conquered Israel and Judah.
During the Captivity in Babylon, following this defeat, the Jewish elite had to learn to practice their religion without such images. They eventually came to believe that such 'idolatrous' practices were why the Lord had punished them by letting their land fall to foreign invaders. Hence several Books of what became the Bible, written round that time, not only condemn idolatry, but play down the extent that it was ever part of the religion of their ancestors.
The authoress, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, does not believe in religion, but she is not a Richard Dawkins type militant atheist. Of Greek ancestry (although she grew up in Britain), from an early age familiar with Myths of Ancient Greek gods, who were usually imagined with humanlike bodies, desires and emotions, she wanted to know if the God of Christianity and Judaism was ever like that, and how He became so different.
This book was first published in 2021, close to the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, which in a few places shows. As normal for academics these days, Professor Stavrakopoulou is Politically Correct.
She says 'Hebrew Bible' rather than privilege Christianity by calling it the Old Testament, and 'South-West Asia' - rather than 'Colonial' terms 'Middle East' or 'Near East'. She uses BCE/CE dates - referring to a meaningless 'Common Era' rather than BC/AD. The cover of the UK paperback edition quotes admiring reviews from arch Religious Wets Rowan Williams and Karen Armstrong. However, don't let any of that put you off reading 'God An Anatomy'.
A sample of other points I learned from this book:
-King Tutankhamen of Egypt had sandals inlaid with pictures on the upper soles showing foreign enemies of Egypt, so he could literally walk on his enemies.
-In Hosea 2.14-15 and Ezekial 16.7-8 God sounds downright lecherous wanting to enjoy the body of Israel, seen as a maiden, and possesively demands fidelity from her.
-By 500 BC, Yahweh worship had become exclusive. The Bible dismisses all other gods as 'gillulim' which translators usually render 'idols' but is literally 'Faeces Gods' (Professor Stavrakopoulou uses a cruder word than 'faeces' here).
-Ezekial 28.17 has the story of a King of Tyre who lived in the Garden of Eden until God cast him out for thinking himself a god. The authoress believes this predates Genesis and is an older version of what developed into the story of Adam and Eve, evicted from Eden for eating a forbidden fruit they think will make them 'like gods'.
-Exodus 34 says Moses was in the presence of God on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights. It troubled later Rabbis that Moses might during that time have 'gone to the lavatory', if I can put it like that, in the presence of God, which to them would be blasphemous, so they came up with explanations as how Moses could go 40 days and nights without needing to answer the call of nature.
-Deuteronomy 34.6 literally says that after Moses died, God personally buried Moses' body. This bothered later Rabbis, as contact with a corpse would have made God, according to his own laws, ritually impure. Hence Rabbis and even Christian translators tend to say vaguely that Moses 'was buried', but not who buried him.
-The earliest myth of the invention of writing is Sumerian, from around 2,000 BC, when the Priest-Kings of the cities of Kullab (later called Uruk) and Anatta quarreled, through messengers, about refurbishing a temple of Inanna. They exchanged increasingly complicated arguments that their messengers had to memorise, until the arguments became too long and complex for the messengers to remember, so King Emmarkar of Kullab invented writing on clay tablets.
-In another Sumerian myth, slightly echoed in the later Greek story of Prometheus, the god Enki hoarded the gifts of writing, carpentry, metalwork, weaponry, leather work, prostitution, textile production, love making, brewing, basketweaving and decision making, which, to the Sumerians, constituted the arts of civilisation, in an underwater temple. The goddess Inanna wanted to give these gifts to the city of Uruk, and persuaded Enki, when he was drunk, to let her take them, which she stowed in her boat. Enki, once sober, changed his mind and Inanna had to battle through storms and sea monsters Enki sent to stop her, but Inanna eventually succeeded in delivering all these gifts to Uruk, and thus to humanity.
*****
In the Acknowledgements at the end of God An Anatomy, the writer thanks a list of her 'clever friends', who 'all made their mark on this book', including 'Natalie Haynes'. I assume that is the Natalie Haynes who 'Stands Up for the Classics' on BBC Radio 4, author of 'A Thousand Ships', which I also reviewed on Goodreads.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
April 15, 2025
– Shelved
