God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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Stavrakopoulou’s thesis is that even during the six centuries over which the books of the Old Testament were written, the immense physicality of this wilder divinity was being erased, not least under the sway of Platonism. “Reverence rather requires . . . an allegorical meaning,” Clement of Alexandria wrote around the turn of the second century CE, expressing a scholarly distaste for the experiential and somatic that remains highly influential. Translators, too, have long sanitised the text, privileging the abstract and metaphysical over the corporeal. But this more primal, vital Yahweh can be reconstructed from scattered passages in the Bible which still retain warm traces of his divine materiality.

The story is one of a journey from an old god from a pantheon who had physical form and would appear on Earth to literally stomp out his enemies, to the incorporeal god of the New Testament. I would perhaps have liked more information on *why* Yahweh lost his body: there is some stuff in here around that, but I think there's more explore. This is a very interesting book. The Ottoman Turks were a very long-lasting and important dynasty, who ruled for seven centuries. And the book unfolds a sweeping narrative stressing the importance of the Ottoman dynasty, both in relation to Middle Eastern countries, but also its role in European history. For many Europeans for about half a millennium, the Ottomans represented the exotic, dangerous and non-Christian Orient. They were the enemy to fear. The book draws out six key moments in Ottoman history as important. As Stavrakopoulou notes, at some point in the history of what became Israel, Hebrew mythology identified the high god, El, with his more active deputy. No one is quite sure, but this seems to be happening well before the great disruption of the Babylonian conquest in the sixth century BCE, though the traces of the older distinction can be seen in some rather laboured passages in Genesis and Exodus where a shift in the divine name has to be explained. On the one hand, this means that the biblical god acquires a double set of robustly physical divine attributes – the more sedentary splendours of the enthroned High God as well as the active and violent characteristics of the warrior storm-god. On the other, it reinforces the sense that the supreme divine power can be the subject of diverse attributes; God is less obviously a straightforwardly amplified physical being, a “big man” – though this does not mean that he loses some of his more toxic gendered qualities. Similarly, after quoting Genesis 1:27, Charles Halton states, “It seems pretty straightforward that if God created humans in the divine image then God must look like a human.” 9Benjamin Sommer likewise states, “The terms used in Genesis 1:26–27, demutand selem, … pertain specifically to the physical contours of God. This becomes especially clear when one views the terms in their ancient Semitic context. They are used to refer to visible, concrete representations of physical objects … [and] there is no evidence suggesting we should read these terms as somehow metaphorical and abstract.” 10 In many of the more obviously folkloric narratives, such as the story of Abraham or the account of the call of Moses in the book of Exodus, the voice and agency of the divine is still a regular presence interrupting the human story. But in the very sophisticated account of the life of Joseph, written probably in the fifth century BCE, God is active obliquely and non-coercively, communicating through dreams. In the equally novelistic tales set in the court of King David – above all, the long narrative of the rebellion and death of David’s son Absalom – this obliqueness is even more evident.God: An Anatomy, written by Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, is very useful. Here, she argues for a corporeal view of God in the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Bible. Numerous passages are provided to support her thesis as she moves from looking at those which focus on his feet, to his legs, torso and finally head. The book is useful for exploring how language about God should be understood (via analogy, symbols, the via negativa or something else). It also provides further thought for units focusing on the attributes of God, especially discussions surrounding whether the philosophical concept of God is supported by the Bible.

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. See BrantA. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 6:191–194; AaronP. Schade and MatthewL. Bowen, The Book of Moses: From the Ancient of Days to the Latter Days(Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2021), 134–137. The second is that Yahweh, the god of the Bible, started life as a fairly minor storm god in a larger pantheon of gods. The major god of this pantheon was El (whose name lives on in the word Israel). The Israelites prioritised Yahweh, who over time took on El’s attributes and even seems to have acquired his wife (renamed Ashera). In the centuries before the Babylonian exile, Yahweh retained many characteristics of a pagan god, and there is strong evidence that other gods were widely worshipped by the Israelites and Judeans.The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. For us, God is not an abstraction. He is not an idea, a metaphysical principle, an impersonal force or power. He is a concrete, living person. And though in our human frailty we cannot know the total mystery of his being, we know that he is akin to us, … and he is, in fact, our Father. … We reaffirm the doctrine of the ancient scripture and of all the prophets that asserts that man was created in the image of God and that God possessed such human qualities as consciousness, will, love, mercy, justice. In other words, he is an exalted, perfected, and glorified Being. 15 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: 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.

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. 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: David L. Paulsen, “ The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives,” BYU Studies Quarterly35, no. 4 (1995–1996): 7–94. Women in Western Political Thought by Professor Susan Moller Okin explores the view of women in the works of philosophers including Plato, Aristotle and Mill, which many students study at A Level. Gaskill has written several books on witchcraft, but this one is a little different. He focuses on one specific episode 370 years ago to teach broader lessons about superstition, mental illness and human cruelty. He examines the misery of the isolation endured by pioneers far from home, trapped in an alien and frightening environment.Apparently it is possible to spend too much time over the dinner table reciting facts you have learned from this book about God's willy to your partner. That's me told. The Book of Mormon and the book of Moses were translated in 1829 and 1830, respectively. 4Thus, humanity’s physical resemblance to deity was one of the earliest truths restored in modern times—a truth which Joseph Smith himself surely understood even earlier thanks to his First Vision. 5 Edmond LaB. Cherbonnier, “ In Defense of Anthropomorphism,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, ed. TrumanG. Madsen (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978), 155–171.

A popular claim of atheists is that God is a Bronze Age deity; a claim that I have previously been pretty uncomfortable with for a number of reasons. First of all, the Hebrew Bible is Iron Age, having largely been written down from the eighth century BCE; secondly, the invisible God of modern Christianity, especially in his intentionally boring post-Enlightenment Protestant incarnations, is very much a cultural product of the modern world. However, in focusing on the Bronze and Iron Ages, Stavrakopoulou shows how integral the early context of God’s development was to his later existence in the Iron Age and beyond, including into Early Christianity and the modern world. Many of the conflicts and contradictions of Christianity are rooted in the on-going rationalisation of texts written in a world with profoundly different concepts of what a deity could or should be, concepts that Stavrakopoulou elucidates clearly and in great detail. Bronze Age qualities have been fossilised in the God of the Bible, and modern Christians are trapped with them in their belief in the sacred truth of that delightfully inconsistent and internally contradictory text. But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.” 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:

It is often moving. It shows us how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences, from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. It is richly illustrated, too. These churches were crucial to English, religious and social life, for church services on Sundays weekdays and for feast days, such as the celebrations at Christmas and Easter. The recurrent cycle of baptism, marriage, funerals, the everyday existence of ordinary people in parish churches are at the very centre of the story. Furthermore, God commanded the Israelites not to make any graven images of God to bow down and worship (see Exodus 20:3–4; Deuteronomy 4:15–19), at least partially because rather than “dumb idols” (Habakkuk 2:8), God’s true image is manifest in living, breathing persons. 17This means, every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect as children of God and reflections of his image and likeness. As President Joseph Fielding Smith taught, First up is The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. Tell us why this one made the shortlist—what makes it one of the best history books of the year? Tellingly, the prophecies of Daniel, from the second century BCE reintroduce images of a “high god” and a second heavenly presence, superficially reminiscent of the archaic Syrian model. But here the second presence is a glorified human figure representing the struggles and sufferings of the Jewish people. This figure is received into the heavenly court as a sign of the triumph, not of the savage regional empires of the period, symbolised by giant beasts at war with each other, but of “the holy people of the Most High” – a society of properly human character, living in devotion, justice and humility. It is an image that can be perceived clearly behind some of the early Christian language about Jesus. But it originally reflects a second great thought-shift in later Hebrew writings. Stavrakopoulou focuses on God as a corporeal entity, so as the concept of an immaterial, invisible God that is prominent today took hold after a few decades of Christianity her account comes to an end. This is not an instantaneous process, and the idea of a bodily God persists well into the Common Era, but under Christianity it is increasing