God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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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 lo I really loved this book. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at a British university who occasionally makes programmes for TV. Anything but distracted by biblical references to God’s body, Stavrakopoulou is aesthetically entranced by them and programmatically attentive to their iconographic and literary contexts from ancient southwest Asia in the fourth millennium BCE to Christian and Jewish Europe as late as the 16th century. Her work, true to its subtitle, is anatomically organised into five parts and an epilogue: I, Feet and Legs; II, Genitals; III, Torso; IV, Arms and Hands; V, Head. Each of these comprises three or four chapters, each with its own fresh emphasis and coherence. “Head”, for example, has separate chapters for ears, nose and mouth. Dr Katherine Southwood is Associate Professor in the Old Testament in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford.

An intellectually subtle and imaginatively original writer such as the prophet Ezekiel (6th century BC) can deploy deliberately symbolic and archaic narratives of male divine violence against an abused and rejected female who stands for the “unfaithful” people of Israel, in ways that have prompted anxiously sanitising interpretations for most of the last two millennia.God,” like God, offers a host of surprising revelations. And the timing of this award — in the season of Christmas and Hanukkah — feels strangely ordained. See Sommer, Bodies of God, 70. CathrineL. McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5–3:24 in Light of themīs pî pīt pî andwpt-r Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt(Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), argues that Genesis 1–3 presents the creation of humanity in a way that imitates the rituals surrounding the creation of idols in Mesopotamia and Egypt, thus implying that human beings stand in the place of statutes as the true image of God. See also Catherine McDowell, “Human Identity and Purpose Redefined: Gen 1:26–28 and 2:5–25 in Context,” Advances in Ancient Biblical and Near Eastern Research1, no. 3 (2021): 29–44. Cf. Sommer, Bodies of God, 19–24.

Carole Hillenbrand | Professor Emerita of Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professorial Fellow (Islamic History) at the University of St Andrews Many of the texts in the Hebrew Bible problematically depict Israel as a woman, using sexualised metaphors — for example, equating idolatry with adultery, or worship of other gods with prostitution. Regularly, macho, hyper-masculine depiction of Yahweh, couched in sexualised language, occurs. Stavrakopoulou is right to point out that there are problems. Biblical scholars have a responsibility to steward, or curate, the biblical texts carefully, and to read ethically.After all, what is it that comes below the hands, resting there at a man’s sides, but above his thighs? Stavrakopopoulou, smartly adducing support from the learned Daniel Boyarin, infers from this jewel-studded evocation of a nude male lover that a comparably jewel-studded sculpture of the nude male Yahweh once stood in the Jerusalem Temple. She draws repeatedly not just on her close reading of the Hebrew but also on her wide and resourceful use of relevant and surprisingly copious lexical and archaeological work done just since the turn of the millennium. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.