What do you think?
God's Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism
God's Phallus explores the dilemmas created by the maleness of God for the men of ancient Judaism and for Jewish men today.
336 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 29, 2023
Not an easy read, especially if you struggle with some of Freud's theories. But worth diving into for a different view of God's relationship with Israel. The author has a good grasp of relevant biblical texts, and various scholarly commentaries. As such it is not frivilous but well researched. Whilst I didn't always agree with the outcomes and the conclusions, it was thought provoking enough to allow me to engage at an objective level.
June 18, 2023
Schwartz, Howard – God’s Phallus and other problems for men and monotheism (1994)
Warning: spoilers ahead.
I read this for school... the title is a bit sketchy for some folks!
Contrary to its attention-grabbing title, the essence of "God's Phallus" revolves around the notable absence, often referred to as "veiling," of male genitalia and other physiological attributes in the biblical depictions of God. Despite this overall goal, Eilberg-Schwartz consistently offers interpretations of both biblical and postbiblical texts that tend to impose upon them a "homoeroticism that was always latent in Israelite theology."
His discussion of homoeroticism permeates the text. For example he writes:
Embracing the Father in volves a willingness to see male-male eroticism as an emotionally whole relationship. It does not mean that all men are homosexual, but it does mean that we recognize the part within ourselves that craves intimate bonds with fathers and other men, though those bonds do not take the form of sexual relationships. My analysis, I hope, shows that homoeroticism, though enormously problematic in the Jewish tradition, is also inescapably part of it. My argument may serve as evidence of how deeply homophobia is inscribed in the tradition, but I hope it also provides resources for celebrating homoeroticism. (p. 241)
This book is informed by a dance among three disciplinary frameworks: gender criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and anthropology. Through the integration of these disciplines, the book seeks to both broaden and deepen the feminist analysis of the portrayal of God in monotheistic religions, with a specific focus on Judaism. The central argument presented is that the concept of God's masculinity poses challenges not only for women but also for men. While feminist critique addresses the equivalence of masculinity in both divinity and humanity, psychoanalytic approaches highlight the tensions and contradictions that exist between these notions of masculinity. A main argument that permeates this book is that in the complex interplay between the human and divine male entities, a notable dimension involves the recurring portrayal of Israel and God as intimate partners and lovers. However, this depiction brings about a unique dilemma: it presents men as engaging in a marital and sexual connection with a male deity. To address the potentially homoerotic connotations of this representation, a solution was devised—namely, the institution of a prohibition against visual depictions of God.
The author opens with his argument:
But from where does the idea of a disembodied God come? What if, historically speaking, it is discomfort with the idea of God's penis that has generated the idea of an incorporeal God? What if this uneasiness flows from the contradictions inherent in men's relationship with a God who is explicitly male? This in a nutshell is the argument of this book. This is why the title "God's Phallus" is a serious one that points to interesting questions about the nature of religious symbols and the way in which issues of gender, sexuality, and desire are inseparable from them. (p. 1)
The idea that God is not gendered is a tough one for the early writers of the Hebrew Bible. Schwartz explains:
The sexlessness of the father God was problematic in a culture defined by patrilineal descent. A man was expected to reproduce, to carry on his line, yet he was also understood to be made in the image of a God who was essentially celibate. As we shall see, the decreasing importance of patrilineage in late antique Judaism would have an enormous impact on the religious conception of masculinity (p. 4).
It is/was difficult for Israel to divorce herself from anthropomorphic views of deity. The author explains:
One of the central claims of this book is that symbolic domains interpenetrate and through their interpenetration spawn unintended and unpredictable consequences. In this way, the image of God loving female Israel cannot be entirely divorced from the image of God in relationship with specific Israelite men… there is no idea that is not embodied in metaphors, and to be embodied in that way is to be caught up in a set of meanings and connotations that are woven into the very fabric of an idea (p. 7).
The author asks his readers to see monotheism from a new point of view:
Scholars have grown so accustomed to thinking of monotheism as a moral and intellectual breakthrough that it no longer requires explanation. Even interpreters who are not committed to the superiority of monotheism have often uncritically inherited biases from their predecessors and teachers. But I am asking that we temporarily bracket our familiar assumptions in order to encounter monotheism afresh, as if we never heard of it before. What might we say about it if it was just another religious tradition that had been discovered among some unheard.-of people? (p. 10)
In chapter 1, the author admits that the early Israelites had an anthropomorphic conception of deity:
There are, however, a number of myths in ancient Judaism that imagine God as having, or at least appearing in, human form. To cite but one example, Moses and other Israelite leaders are described in Exodus going up to the top of the mountain and seeing God: "Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel as cended; and they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for its purity. Yet He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they be held God, and they ate and drank" (Exod. 24:9-11).
God not having a phallus created problems for Jewish men. Schwartz explains:
To be like God the creator, they must procreate. But to be like God they should have no sex and no desire. It is a crucial question, then, to consider why divine masculinity is figured without desire and without its potent symbol, the phallus. In my view, male projection theory must come to terms with the veiling of the divine sex. In other words, in what ways does the veiling of a divine phallus affect the way in which the deity, as symbol of the male, serves as an object of male emulation, as a source of conflict and rivalry for men, and as an object of male desire? (p. 26)
Chapter 2: Analytic Phalluses
The author states one reason why images of deity as having a body were repressed:
My analysis of monotheism suggests that the image of the father God’s body must be prohibited or veiled so that it does not provoke homoerotic desires (p. 38).
The author speaks of Moses, monotheism, and Freud throughout this chapter. He concludes with the following:
… consider again Freud's claim that the prohibition on images was analogous to the discovery of paternity. Both, he suggests, were triumphs of the spirit or intellect over sensuality. The prohibition on images forced people to conceptualize rather than image God. Similarly, Freud believes paternity is based on reason and not the senses. In his view, the father of a child must be inferred, whereas the mother is always obvious. But in light of the foregoing, Freud's claim about paternity now sounds a lot like a wish. To construe paternity as spiritual is to imagine a father as a nonsexual being without a body. Yet Freud's entire Oedipus complex presupposes a boy's understanding of his father as a sexual being with a penis like his own. Indeed, the boy fears castration because he believes he poses a threat and competition to his father's sexual relationship with the mother. Freud's linking of the prohibition on images to the discovery of paternity thus suggests that what is true of one is true of the other: he wishes to imagine both a human father and a divine father without an organ of reproduction (p. 56).
Part 2 of the book is called “God’s body: The Divine Cover-Up”
Chapter 3 discusses the “avert your gaze” texts in the Hebrew Bible, as well as the early conceptions of an anthropomorphic god. Thorugh their connection with Greek philosophy, the Jews cultivated a view of god that eliminated literal conceptions of an anthropomorphic divine being. Schwarz explains:
Eventually philosophers such as Philo and Maimonides systematically read Jewish tradition in light of Plato and Aristotle, a reading so powerful that it continues to find devotees among modem interpreters. But the question is whether Jews discovered these ideas independently, as Greeks and many Jews came to believe, or whether these ideas were imposed upon earlier sources, thereby distorting our understanding of them. Many interpreters assume that even prior to contact with Hellenistic civilization Jews developed certain religious conceptions analogous to those of the Greek philosophers. In particular, Jews, like the Greeks, rejected polytheism as well as the belief in embodied deities. The evidence cited for this Jewish discovery are those sources that are said to exhibit ambivalence about God's body. (p. 74)
Chapter 4 looks at instances where men were exposed … the phrase “see your father’s nakedness” comes to mind, specifically as it pertains to the curse put upon Canaan at the conclusion of the Noah story with Ham viewing Noahs’ “nakedness.”
Israel was to love god:
Israelite religion was unique among ancient Near Eastern traditions in applying the metaphor of marriage to the relationship between God and a collectivity. No other god in the ancient Near East was said to be husband of the people. Interpreters have tended to view the metaphor of whoring after other gods as a response to Canaanite fertility practices which involved the hieros gamos, the marriage of Baal with nature. But this interpretation is no longer compelling (p. 99)
… Men were to imagine themselves as married to and hence in a loving relationship with God. A homoerotic dilemma was thus generated, inadvertently and or some degree unconsciously, by the superimposition of heterosexual images on the relationship between human and divine males.
Schwartz admits that Israel’s early views of god were “henotheistic or monolatrous” (p. 105), thus dipping his toe a bit into the water of Mark Smith (and Peter Enns) and his explanation of the evolution of deity from a wider perspective than is normally discussed in many biblical circles.
In chapter 5 “Genital Speculation,” the author discusses how some prophets like Hosea spoke of Israel who will one day “know” the Lord, with all that entails (p. 110-111).
This brings us to the prohibition of images. The author explains:
Since Israel is forbidden to have any other gods, Yahweh cannot be imagined as having a sexual partner, and it is precisely at the moment when other gods are ruled out of lsrael's imaginative universe that the problem of the divine sex becomes difficult. Hence the second commandment- the prohibition on images responds to the problem generated by the first commandment. That is not to say, however, that the prohibition on images necessarily developed hand in hand with the prohibition against worshiping other gods. But the juxtaposition of these rules suggests that the ideas came to be linked and understood to support one another (p. 121)…. Because God cannot have a divine sexual partner, Israel in effect becomes equivalent of God’s spouse… You (masculine singular) are my wife whose fidelity I guard, God says to each Israelite man. The prohibition on images is thus evoked precisely where the dilemma of a homoerotic relationship threatens to emerge (p. 221)… The veiling of the fathers body, then, takes a variety of forms in lsraelite religion: the prohibition on making images, the aversion of the gaze of characters who see God, and the submerging of the listener's perspectives into the perspective of God (p. 121).
Of course the author explores other ideas in this book. Chapter 6 “unmanning Israel” and 7 “Women rabbis and the orchard of heavenly delights,” as well as 8 “A sexless father and his procreating sons,” and 9 “the virgin birth and the sons of God” cover various topics like the Watchers myth of Enoch and Genesis 6 to the idea of Jesus being born of a virgin, to subjects like the ascension texts in hekalot literature. The author concludes with a statement that I find refreshing:
By embracing a fatherly image of God, I by no means intend to suggest that we should abandon serious analyses of patriarchal religion or attempts to reform the liturgy by introducing feminine imagery for God or using more inclusive language. As I have said, the idea of the loving father God is viable only when equally compelling feminine images are employed as well. I imagine a liturgy in which both male and female images are evoked, in which each of us can see God as nurturing and powerful (p. 240).
Overall this book was a bit of a slog to follow at times, and yet at other times was wonderfully constructed. I did not agree with all of the author's conclusions, but appreciate the viewpoints of the author nonetheless.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
I read this for school... the title is a bit sketchy for some folks!
Contrary to its attention-grabbing title, the essence of "God's Phallus" revolves around the notable absence, often referred to as "veiling," of male genitalia and other physiological attributes in the biblical depictions of God. Despite this overall goal, Eilberg-Schwartz consistently offers interpretations of both biblical and postbiblical texts that tend to impose upon them a "homoeroticism that was always latent in Israelite theology."
His discussion of homoeroticism permeates the text. For example he writes:
Embracing the Father in volves a willingness to see male-male eroticism as an emotionally whole relationship. It does not mean that all men are homosexual, but it does mean that we recognize the part within ourselves that craves intimate bonds with fathers and other men, though those bonds do not take the form of sexual relationships. My analysis, I hope, shows that homoeroticism, though enormously problematic in the Jewish tradition, is also inescapably part of it. My argument may serve as evidence of how deeply homophobia is inscribed in the tradition, but I hope it also provides resources for celebrating homoeroticism. (p. 241)
This book is informed by a dance among three disciplinary frameworks: gender criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and anthropology. Through the integration of these disciplines, the book seeks to both broaden and deepen the feminist analysis of the portrayal of God in monotheistic religions, with a specific focus on Judaism. The central argument presented is that the concept of God's masculinity poses challenges not only for women but also for men. While feminist critique addresses the equivalence of masculinity in both divinity and humanity, psychoanalytic approaches highlight the tensions and contradictions that exist between these notions of masculinity. A main argument that permeates this book is that in the complex interplay between the human and divine male entities, a notable dimension involves the recurring portrayal of Israel and God as intimate partners and lovers. However, this depiction brings about a unique dilemma: it presents men as engaging in a marital and sexual connection with a male deity. To address the potentially homoerotic connotations of this representation, a solution was devised—namely, the institution of a prohibition against visual depictions of God.
The author opens with his argument:
But from where does the idea of a disembodied God come? What if, historically speaking, it is discomfort with the idea of God's penis that has generated the idea of an incorporeal God? What if this uneasiness flows from the contradictions inherent in men's relationship with a God who is explicitly male? This in a nutshell is the argument of this book. This is why the title "God's Phallus" is a serious one that points to interesting questions about the nature of religious symbols and the way in which issues of gender, sexuality, and desire are inseparable from them. (p. 1)
The idea that God is not gendered is a tough one for the early writers of the Hebrew Bible. Schwartz explains:
The sexlessness of the father God was problematic in a culture defined by patrilineal descent. A man was expected to reproduce, to carry on his line, yet he was also understood to be made in the image of a God who was essentially celibate. As we shall see, the decreasing importance of patrilineage in late antique Judaism would have an enormous impact on the religious conception of masculinity (p. 4).
It is/was difficult for Israel to divorce herself from anthropomorphic views of deity. The author explains:
One of the central claims of this book is that symbolic domains interpenetrate and through their interpenetration spawn unintended and unpredictable consequences. In this way, the image of God loving female Israel cannot be entirely divorced from the image of God in relationship with specific Israelite men… there is no idea that is not embodied in metaphors, and to be embodied in that way is to be caught up in a set of meanings and connotations that are woven into the very fabric of an idea (p. 7).
The author asks his readers to see monotheism from a new point of view:
Scholars have grown so accustomed to thinking of monotheism as a moral and intellectual breakthrough that it no longer requires explanation. Even interpreters who are not committed to the superiority of monotheism have often uncritically inherited biases from their predecessors and teachers. But I am asking that we temporarily bracket our familiar assumptions in order to encounter monotheism afresh, as if we never heard of it before. What might we say about it if it was just another religious tradition that had been discovered among some unheard.-of people? (p. 10)
In chapter 1, the author admits that the early Israelites had an anthropomorphic conception of deity:
There are, however, a number of myths in ancient Judaism that imagine God as having, or at least appearing in, human form. To cite but one example, Moses and other Israelite leaders are described in Exodus going up to the top of the mountain and seeing God: "Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel as cended; and they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for its purity. Yet He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they be held God, and they ate and drank" (Exod. 24:9-11).
God not having a phallus created problems for Jewish men. Schwartz explains:
To be like God the creator, they must procreate. But to be like God they should have no sex and no desire. It is a crucial question, then, to consider why divine masculinity is figured without desire and without its potent symbol, the phallus. In my view, male projection theory must come to terms with the veiling of the divine sex. In other words, in what ways does the veiling of a divine phallus affect the way in which the deity, as symbol of the male, serves as an object of male emulation, as a source of conflict and rivalry for men, and as an object of male desire? (p. 26)
Chapter 2: Analytic Phalluses
The author states one reason why images of deity as having a body were repressed:
My analysis of monotheism suggests that the image of the father God’s body must be prohibited or veiled so that it does not provoke homoerotic desires (p. 38).
The author speaks of Moses, monotheism, and Freud throughout this chapter. He concludes with the following:
… consider again Freud's claim that the prohibition on images was analogous to the discovery of paternity. Both, he suggests, were triumphs of the spirit or intellect over sensuality. The prohibition on images forced people to conceptualize rather than image God. Similarly, Freud believes paternity is based on reason and not the senses. In his view, the father of a child must be inferred, whereas the mother is always obvious. But in light of the foregoing, Freud's claim about paternity now sounds a lot like a wish. To construe paternity as spiritual is to imagine a father as a nonsexual being without a body. Yet Freud's entire Oedipus complex presupposes a boy's understanding of his father as a sexual being with a penis like his own. Indeed, the boy fears castration because he believes he poses a threat and competition to his father's sexual relationship with the mother. Freud's linking of the prohibition on images to the discovery of paternity thus suggests that what is true of one is true of the other: he wishes to imagine both a human father and a divine father without an organ of reproduction (p. 56).
Part 2 of the book is called “God’s body: The Divine Cover-Up”
Chapter 3 discusses the “avert your gaze” texts in the Hebrew Bible, as well as the early conceptions of an anthropomorphic god. Thorugh their connection with Greek philosophy, the Jews cultivated a view of god that eliminated literal conceptions of an anthropomorphic divine being. Schwarz explains:
Eventually philosophers such as Philo and Maimonides systematically read Jewish tradition in light of Plato and Aristotle, a reading so powerful that it continues to find devotees among modem interpreters. But the question is whether Jews discovered these ideas independently, as Greeks and many Jews came to believe, or whether these ideas were imposed upon earlier sources, thereby distorting our understanding of them. Many interpreters assume that even prior to contact with Hellenistic civilization Jews developed certain religious conceptions analogous to those of the Greek philosophers. In particular, Jews, like the Greeks, rejected polytheism as well as the belief in embodied deities. The evidence cited for this Jewish discovery are those sources that are said to exhibit ambivalence about God's body. (p. 74)
Chapter 4 looks at instances where men were exposed … the phrase “see your father’s nakedness” comes to mind, specifically as it pertains to the curse put upon Canaan at the conclusion of the Noah story with Ham viewing Noahs’ “nakedness.”
Israel was to love god:
Israelite religion was unique among ancient Near Eastern traditions in applying the metaphor of marriage to the relationship between God and a collectivity. No other god in the ancient Near East was said to be husband of the people. Interpreters have tended to view the metaphor of whoring after other gods as a response to Canaanite fertility practices which involved the hieros gamos, the marriage of Baal with nature. But this interpretation is no longer compelling (p. 99)
… Men were to imagine themselves as married to and hence in a loving relationship with God. A homoerotic dilemma was thus generated, inadvertently and or some degree unconsciously, by the superimposition of heterosexual images on the relationship between human and divine males.
Schwartz admits that Israel’s early views of god were “henotheistic or monolatrous” (p. 105), thus dipping his toe a bit into the water of Mark Smith (and Peter Enns) and his explanation of the evolution of deity from a wider perspective than is normally discussed in many biblical circles.
In chapter 5 “Genital Speculation,” the author discusses how some prophets like Hosea spoke of Israel who will one day “know” the Lord, with all that entails (p. 110-111).
This brings us to the prohibition of images. The author explains:
Since Israel is forbidden to have any other gods, Yahweh cannot be imagined as having a sexual partner, and it is precisely at the moment when other gods are ruled out of lsrael's imaginative universe that the problem of the divine sex becomes difficult. Hence the second commandment- the prohibition on images responds to the problem generated by the first commandment. That is not to say, however, that the prohibition on images necessarily developed hand in hand with the prohibition against worshiping other gods. But the juxtaposition of these rules suggests that the ideas came to be linked and understood to support one another (p. 121)…. Because God cannot have a divine sexual partner, Israel in effect becomes equivalent of God’s spouse… You (masculine singular) are my wife whose fidelity I guard, God says to each Israelite man. The prohibition on images is thus evoked precisely where the dilemma of a homoerotic relationship threatens to emerge (p. 221)… The veiling of the fathers body, then, takes a variety of forms in lsraelite religion: the prohibition on making images, the aversion of the gaze of characters who see God, and the submerging of the listener's perspectives into the perspective of God (p. 121).
Of course the author explores other ideas in this book. Chapter 6 “unmanning Israel” and 7 “Women rabbis and the orchard of heavenly delights,” as well as 8 “A sexless father and his procreating sons,” and 9 “the virgin birth and the sons of God” cover various topics like the Watchers myth of Enoch and Genesis 6 to the idea of Jesus being born of a virgin, to subjects like the ascension texts in hekalot literature. The author concludes with a statement that I find refreshing:
By embracing a fatherly image of God, I by no means intend to suggest that we should abandon serious analyses of patriarchal religion or attempts to reform the liturgy by introducing feminine imagery for God or using more inclusive language. As I have said, the idea of the loving father God is viable only when equally compelling feminine images are employed as well. I imagine a liturgy in which both male and female images are evoked, in which each of us can see God as nurturing and powerful (p. 240).
Overall this book was a bit of a slog to follow at times, and yet at other times was wonderfully constructed. I did not agree with all of the author's conclusions, but appreciate the viewpoints of the author nonetheless.
August 14, 2025
it had some fascinating information to explore in the first half but ultimately its analyses just talk in monotonous circles only to never really make too strong of argument. ultimately, just like the figure it explores who also studied masculinity in Judaism, the book proposes a series of Freudian statements ("everything is just phallic symbolism"). doesn't ever earn the provocation/interest of its strong title
May 14, 2025
A very interesting analysis of how concerns about homoeroticism in the relationship between God and male worshippers contributed to the development of the concept of an incorporeal deity, with some reflections on why that concept may be psychologically unhelpful.
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