God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Most biblical scholars would agree that when God says, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness’, he is addressing the other members of the ‘divine assembly’ – the biblical label given to God’s council of lower-ranking deities and divine beings.

Written in about the fifth century BCE, but drawing on older mythologies, the creation story that now begins the Bible reflects a time when Yahweh – the deity of Jerusalem, now better known as God – had yet to be imagined as the only divine being in the universe.

Above all, he was still several centuries away from becoming the immaterial, incorporeal abstraction of later Jewish and Christian theologies. Instead, he was just like any other deity in the ancient world. He had a head, hair and a face; eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth. He had arms, hands, legs and feet, and a chest and a back. He was equipped with a heart, a tongue, teeth and genitals. He was a god who breathed, in and out. This was a deity who not only looked like a human – albeit on a far more impressive, glamourous scale – but who very often behaved like a human. He enjoyed evening strolls and hearty meals; he listened to music, wrote books and made lists. He was a god who not only spoke, but whistled, laughed, shouted, wept and talked to himself. He was a god who fell in love and into fights; a god who squabbled with his worshippers and grappled with his enemies; a god who made friends, raised children, took wives and had sex.

Some are collections of oracles attributed to various prophets, and others are compilations of poetry, ritual songs, prayers and teachings. But none of these texts have reached us in their ‘original’ form. Instead, all were subject to creative and repeated revision, addition, emendation and editing across a number of generations, reflecting the shifting ideological interests of their curators, who regarded them as sacred writings.

To put it bluntly, the Hebrew Bible offers a highly ideological and frequently unreliable portrayal of the past. It is a story told from the perspective of pro-Jerusalem writers and editors, for it was the trauma of Judah’s conquest in the sixth century BCE, and Jerusalem’s gradual regeneration in the Persian era, that triggered the literary activities giving rise to the texts of the Hebrew Bible as we find them today.

God’s body is nowhere denied in the Bible. It is simply assumed – whether or not mortals were privileged enough to catch a glimpse of it.

Following their exodus from Egypt, a committee of Israelite elders had ascended Mount Sinai and seen first God’s feet, then the deity himself. Among them, of course, was Moses, who is said to have enjoyed regular meetings with God, talking to him ‘face to face, as one would speak to a friend’.[8] Moses is not the only one claimed to have experienced God’s physical presence. In Genesis, Abraham walks alongside him, and Jacob has a wrestling match with him.