The Bodies of God
We often hear that Jews, even religious Jews, tend not to think much about God. Somehow we Jews are comfortable talking about our people, our history, our heritage, our sacred books – but God? Isn’t that for people in, I don’t know, some red state?
I remember being at several wonderful events at our kids’ Solomon Schechter school in Chicago. The programs spoke meaningfully and movingly about Israel, the Holocaust, our families’ arrival in this country. But they rarely if ever mentioned God.
This shying away from the big G occurs in academic settings, too. On the last day of an academic conference on Jewish biblical theology, Richard Elliott Friedman, the author of Who Wrote the Bible? and The Disappearance of God, noted that here we were, a bunch of Jewish biblical scholars at a conference on theology, and so far nobody had mentioned God. Why was that? The participants, embarrassed to have been caught ignoring the “theo” part of “theology,” suddenly started talking about God intensely. But until Friedman brought it up, God was not on the agenda.
I respond to this neglect in my academic work and in my teaching at synagogues and other Jewish settings. In my new book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, I encourage people to think more about Judaism’s God by focusing attention on some rather bizarre ways of perceiving God that can be found in parts of the Tanach.
I begin by pointing out that contrary to what many of us learned in Hebrew school, the God of the Tanach has a body. I say this at the outset, because so many people, including many scholars, assume otherwise. The biblical evidence for this simple thesis is overwhelming, so much so that asserting the embodied nature of the biblical God should not occasion surprise. I go on to show that the startling idea in the Hebrew Bible is something else entirely. It is not that God has a body – that is the standard notion of ancient Israelite theology – but that God has several different bodies.
According to an ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity that shows up in certain parts of the Bible, a god (or, in its biblical version, God) differs from a human being because a god can have more than one body, each one located at some specific place on earth or in heaven. As a result, a god (or God) has a fluid self that is quite unlike the self of a human. The dominant strains of biblical religion rejected this understanding of divinity, which I call the “fluidity tradition,” but it is still found in some texts, especially in Genesis, Exodus, Judges, Hosea, Isaiah, and Psalms. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers inherited this ancient way of thinking, incorporating it into the doctrines of sefirot in kabbalah and the trinity in Christianity.
I spent 10 wonderful, eye-opening and stimulating years working on this book. The topic appeals to me because it allows me to address several types of religious questions.
Modern biblical scholars often claim that the religion of the Hebrew Bible or Tanach is quite removed from what we know as Judaism. Some biblical critics, both Christian and Jewish, take what I think is an immature delight in trying to show that the Tanach really belongs to the cultures of the ancient Near East and not to Judaism. I show, however, that it is precisely when we recover a lost ancient Near Eastern way of perceiving divinity that we recognize a deep continuity between the Tanach and later Jewish thought. We also notice the deep roots of some kabbalistic ideas in earlier Judaism, not only in rabbinic literature but also in the Tanach itself. (In this regard, my project is a footnote to and extension of the lifework of the great scholar at Hebrew University, Moshe Idel, who demonstrated the ancient rabbinic origins of basic ideas found in medieval Jewish mysticism.)
This is a conception of God that is likely to make many Jews feel uncomfortable, even those Jews who feel okay admitting that there is a God and that Judaism really is all about God. The book requires me to ask basic questions about the nature of Jewish monotheism, since the belief that eyn lo demut haguf v’eino guf – God has no body – has become almost synonymous with monotheism. For Maimonides and other medieval Jewish philosophers, the denial of the notion that God has a body was a crucial aspect of monotheism; a God with a body was a God who could be divided into parts, and not a God who could be called “one.” For these thinkers, the sort of polytheism implied by the belief in a physical God was even more objectionable than the belief in many gods. But I think the biblical authors who believe that God has many bodies in fact are monotheists: They believe that Yhwh/ Hashem is the only being in the universe with unalterable power. For these ancient Israelite authors the multiplicity and fluidity of God’s bodies allow us to realize how different Hashem is from all other beings in the universe, whether humans or angels or ants. Oddly enough, then, the aggressive anthropomorphism of these biblical authors leads them to their very thoroughgoing monotheism.
The texts that display this way of perceiving God (for example, Genesis 18, 28.16-19, 31.13, 35.14-15, 48.15-16; Exodus 3, 23.10-21, 33.1-3; Judges 6; 2 Samuel 15; Hosea 12) prompt us to ponder some explicitly theological questions: What does this way of thinking have to say to modern Jews who accept as their scripture texts that contain such strange ideas? What aspects of God does this way of thinking help modern Jews to see that they would otherwise miss? What Jewish ideas does it force Jews to recognize that they might prefer not to think about? I ask these questions as both a historian of religion and a committed Jew who hopes to contribute something to the ongoing development of Torah.
My bedrock assumption as a biblical theologian is that every passage found in Jewish scripture is there to teach us something. We have the right to react to what is in scripture, we have the right to disagree with it, but we have no right to ignore it. What once was Torah in some way always remains Torah; supersessionism is not a Jewishly valid option. Consequently, a Jewish understanding of God that does not reflect this bizarre way of perceiving God is a defective one. Without necessarily accepting this way of thinking in its entirety, modern Jews ought to see what it has to contribute to our own attempts to know God.
These contributions include an emphasis on the idea of sacred space; some places on earth are metaphysically different from others because they once housed God. They also include a critique of the idea of sacred space, because a God with many bodies has been in many places, so that no one space, not even Jerusalem, is uniquely holy. Both ideas are crucial for modern Jews. The centrality of sacred space is important for those on the left who fail to acknowledge the holiness of the land of Israel as a crucial aspect of Jewish belief. The relativizing of sacred space, on the other hand, is important for those on the right who need to hear this critique lest they continue to promote their idolatry of the land of Israel.
Another implication of the fluidity tradition has to do with our closeness to and distance from God. A God with a body is very clearly a person and not a philosophical abstraction. This is a God whom we can love and be angry at and speak with, a God with whom we can have a relationship, because a being with a body is a being like us. An embodied being can be wounded and can change. In short, the embodied God is the personal God of our father Abraham (and of Abraham Joshua Heschel). The God with many bodies is all this, but that God also is radically different from us. A being with one body, like you or me, is by definition limited. But the one Being with many bodies has no limits. The God described in the biblical texts I examine, this God with many bodies, can rise above God’s own physicality. This God remains woundable and alterable, but also omnipotent. This way of perceiving divinity points toward God’s freedom, even as it expresses Hashem’s grace – more specifically, Hashem’s desire to become accessible to humanity. This conception renders God an unfathomable being, but nevertheless one with whom we can enter into dialogue, and thus it matters to modern Jews, as do the ancient texts that reveal it.
Dr. Benjamin D. Sommer is professor of Bible and ancient Semitic languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
