God: An Anatomy

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Dissecting the Divine

In June 2018, news platforms across much of the world published a photograph of God. ‘Does THIS photograph show the true face of God?’ shouted one click-bait headline. ‘Science reveals the face of God and it looks like Elon Musk’, teased another. Others, including NBC’s website, were rather less sensationalist in their headlines: ‘The face of God is in the eye of the beholder’. The photograph in question showed a fuzzy black-and-white image of a middle-aged, beardless Caucasian male, with a soft, rounded face and just a hint of a smile (fig. 1). The image was produced by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who showed a demographically representative sample of US Christians a series of computer-generated faces embodying certain cultural stereotypes of emotional, ethical, social and spiritual values, and asked them to select those faces perceived to best reflect their mental image of God. Some of the faces were androgynous in appearance, while some were more feminine, and some more masculine. All the faces were grey, like a black-and-white photocopy, but some were lighter skinned and some were darker skinned. Some faces were expressive, some were seemingly blank. But each face was a canvas onto which the experiment’s participants were free to project their own assumptions. The results were averaged out and used to create God’s e-fit. Unsurprisingly, the study revealed that in the US, God is made in the image of a white American man.

Psychologists and social anthropologists have long understood that a very heavy dose of cognitive bias underlies the construction of the divine in human societies. But while modern studies like those conducted at Chapel Hill can tell us something of the psychological and social processes underlying this tendency, this is hardly news. Over two and a half thousand years ago, in the late sixth or early fifth century bce, the Greek intellectual and adventurer Xenophanes of Colophon had already arrived at a similar conclusion: ‘If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves’. For Xenophanes, the human tendency to make gods in our own image was as much about local cultural preferences as overarching, lofty ideals, as the diversity of deities in his world attested: ‘The Ethiopians say that their gods are broad-nosed and dark-skinned, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair’. As far as Xenophanes was concerned, the widespread assumption that the gods had bodies like those of their worshippers was inextricably linked to the notion that deities behaved very much like humans – and this was deeply problematic, for it inevitably cheapened the moral nature of the divine. Proof could be found in the Greek myths themselves: ‘Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that leads to blame and abuse among men – stealing, committing adultery, and deceiving each other’, Xenophanes complained. It was an objection rooted in his philosophically driven insistence that a god was inherently and necessarily a being ‘in no way like mortals either in body or thought’.

Similar ideas were soon championed by other Greek thinkers, most notably Plato (c. 429–347 bce), his student Aristotle (c. 384–322 bce) and subsequent generations of their elitist, learned adherents in the Graeco-Roman world, who theorized that the divine power ultimately undergirding the universe and everything in it was necessarily without a body – an incorporeal, invisible, abstract principle, force or intellect, wholly beyond and distinct from the material world. Not that these rarefied views made much of an impact on the religious lives of ordinary folk. Whether they were schooled in philosophy or not, and no matter the deities they worshipped, most people living in the Graeco-Roman world continued to envisage their gods as corporeal beings with bodies shaped like their own – much as they always had.

But towards the close of the first millennium bce, and into the early centuries of the Common Era, these erudite philosophical ideas would gradually come to shape the thinking of certain Jewish and Christian intellectuals, so that they began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms, drawing ever-sharper distinctions between the heavenly and the earthly, the divine and the human, and the spiritual and the bodily. It is the broadly Platonic notion of the otherness and unlikeness of the divine to anything in or beyond the universe that has shaped the more formal theological constructions of God in the Western religious imagination. And yet these constructions are built on a conceptual framework very much at odds with the Bible itself, for in these ancient texts, God is presented in startlingly anthropomorphic ways. This is a deity with a body.

In the Beginning

The high god had already spent several days speaking new marvels into being – separating the primeval waters of chaos into heavenly and underworld reservoirs; bringing forth dry land, planting it with fruit trees and crops; appointing the sun and moon to light day and night; and commanding the new-formed land, seas and skies to bring forth animals, fish and birds. Now, he was about to speak again. ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’, he says to the other deities in his retinue. It is more a declaration than a suggestion, but a good idea, nonetheless, for the humans will be tasked with keeping order in the newly created earthly realm. And so the high god makes the very first human: ‘God created the human in his image, in the image of God he created him’. The new creature – adam, meaning ‘man’ or ‘human’ – bears a bodily resemblance to his divine creator, and is swiftly paired with a female version: ‘male and female he created them’. Equipped with god-shaped bodies, humans are rendered superior to the other newly made creatures of the world, over whom they are appointed to rule. Blessing humans with fertility, the high god gives them two tasks: to procreate and dominate. They are to fill this new world with their offspring, and keep the other creatures under control. Satisfied with his creative accomplishments, the high god decides his work is done. The next day, he rests.

In academic circles, there is nothing particularly contentious about this paraphrase of the opening chapter of the book of Genesis. 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. And most would agree (even if some might squirm a little) that in being made in the image and likeness of the gods, freshly minted humans bear a visual resemblance to their own deities, just as Adam’s son Seth is later said to be the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of his father, and in other biblical texts, divine statues are the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of the gods they represent.3 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. Like the Babylonian deity Marduk, or the Greek god Zeus, this ancient deity had long been cast as the king of the cosmos, but like them, he was far from alone in the heavens. 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.

This portrait of God has not been lifted from obscure myths inscribed on long-abandoned clay tablets. It is drawn from the Bible itself – a book as complex as the deity it promotes, not least because the Bible is not a book at all, but a collection of books, falling into two parts. The first is the Hebrew Bible, known in Judaism as Tanakh, and in Christianity as the Old Testament, and it is an anthology of ancient texts, originally crafted as scrolls. Most of these texts are themselves complex compilations of diverse literary traditions, and the majority were composed between the eighth and second centuries bce in Judah, a small southern polity in the ancient Levant – the region we know today as Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and western Syria. In the eighth century bce, Judah was a kingdom captured by Assyria; at the beginning of the sixth century bce, it was conquered again, this time by the Babylonians. By the fifth century bce, Judah had become a Persian province, and in about 333 bce, it was incorporated into Alexander the Great’s vast empire. Some Hebrew Bible texts tell of Judah’s changing political fortunes, while others are stories about legendary heroes and myths about the very distant past. 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.

It is this long process of creative curation that has given narrative shape to the biblical story of God’s relationship with ‘Israel’, the people in whom he takes a special interest. The first five books of the Hebrew Bible tell of the founding of this relationship. Following the creation of the world and the great flood, God forges a covenant (or contract) relationship with the Israelites’ ancestors – Abraham, his son Isaac and grandson Jacob – promising them a multitude of descendants in return for their obedience, which is to be demonstrated primarily by their worship of him alone. When the Israelites find themselves enslaved in Egypt, God liberates them, tasking Moses both to lead them to the ‘promised land’ of Canaan and to instruct them in God’s teaching (torah  ) – the regulations which will shape their ongoing relationship with the deity, including instructions for the glorious temple they are to build in their divinely granted homeland. Collectively, these five books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy – are known as the Torah, and together they rework what were probably competing traditions about ancestors and origins into a broadly coherent narrative about ‘Israelite’ identity.

The crafting of the past is continued in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Together, this second block of material tells of the conquest and settlement of Canaan and the reigns of the first Israelite monarchs: Saul, then David, who makes Jerusalem his capital, followed by Solomon, who builds God a temple there. These books continue with stories about the fracturing of the kingdom into two, after Solomon’s death: Israel, in the north, and Judah, in the south. The fates of the kingdoms are traced, skipping briskly past the Assyrian defeat of the kingdom of Israel in the late eighth century bce, and ending in the early sixth century bce with the Babylonian conquest of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its elites to Mesopotamia – events depicted as a punishment from God for generations of religious malpractice. The biblical portrayal of the past resumes in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which focus on the return of the exiles in the late sixth and fifth centuries bce. In spite of their former transgressions, this group is now the divinely elected, ‘purified’ remnant of the ancient people of God – a notion similarly expressed in some of the prophetic works dating to this period. Restored to divine favour and back in the homeland, they rebuild Jerusalem and its temple, and recommit themselves to the divine teaching Moses had mediated.

Historically, only the later episodes of this biblical story broadly dovetail with known realities, at best consigning Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and even David and Solomon, to the realms of fable – and at worst, to sheer fantasy. But from the ninth century bce onwards, archaeological evidence points to the existence of the separate Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and corroborates the names of some of their kings. Mesopotamian records confirm the Assyrian destruction of Israel in the late eighth century bce, and the Babylonian defeat of Judah in the early sixth century bce; Mesopotamian annals also attest to the forced migration of some higher-status groups from both kingdoms – a common imperial strategy designed to curtail local uprisings in conquered territories – and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that some deportees did indeed return from Babylonia to Judah in the late sixth or early fifth century bce.

But non-biblical material can also flag the limitations of the Bible’s portrayal of the past, warning us that it cannot be taken as a comprehensive or reliable ‘record’ of history. In the books of Kings, for example, a ninth-century bce ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, named Omri, is presented as a figure of marginal significance, whose only noteworthy accomplishment is the founding of a new capital city, Samaria. But an inscribed stela set up by Mesha, king of neighbouring Moab, celebrates the regaining of sizable Moabite territories from ‘Omri king of Israel’ and his successor, both of whom had ‘oppressed Moab for a long time’. The longevity of Omri’s territorial and dynastic legacy is also reflected in Assyrian texts of the ninth and eighth centuries bce, in which the kingdom of Israel is frequently designated ‘Omri-land’ and its various kings as ‘sons of Omri’. The possibility that the Judahite writer of the books of Kings has not only minimized but suppressed Omri’s significance is signalled by an oblique, fleeting reference to ‘the rest of the acts of Omri, and the power that he showed’.

The partisan perspectives of the biblical writers and editors are also evident in an overarching insistence that the Jerusalem temple served as the only ‘legitimate’ site of Yahweh worship. Other ritual sites are downplayed as mere shrines, or disparagingly dismissed as idolatrous, and are said to have been closed down by especially virtuous kings of Judah.