God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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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. God, as he is now understood by monotheistic religions, wasn’t always a singular deity. When Sargon II of Assyria conquered Israel in the eighth century BCE, he described seizing statues of “the gods in whom they trusted”. Who were these other gods – and what was Yahweh to them? Thanks to second-millennium BCE texts from the Syrian city-state Ugarit, we know that Yahweh was once a minor storm god of a wild, mountainous region south of the Negev desert. He was part of a large pantheon of Levantine gods headed by the patriarch El and his consort Athirat. Stavrakopoulou claims that Job knows Yahweh is assaulting him. Actually, let's not call the verbal challenges an assault, but just an interrogation.

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 An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers--with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous. Aaron P. Schade and Matthew L. 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), 131–143.Beyond sexuality and creation, she also talks about Yahweh as an embodied war leader, soaked on blood, and often shown as arguably being addicted to violence. Again, she shows plenty of ANET parallels. 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. In this whole book God is anthropomorphised. Through a close examination of the Bible, Stavrakopoulou writes about the various gods depicted in ancient myths and rituals. They came from a particular time, and they were made in the image of the people who lived then, who were shaped by their circumstances and experience of the world. She argues that important people in the Hebrew Bible were not historical figures and that probably very little of the Hebrew Bible is historical fact. She bases this on arguments that ancient writers had an understanding of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ very different from a modern definition of those terms. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. The book presents this picture with a wealth of scholarly detail and much gusto (and occasional tabloidish hype). Stavrakopoulou is a distinguished scholar of the archaeological record and summarises its data with skill. But the interpretation of her material raises some large questions. We are told more than once that this book introduces us to “the real God of the Bible” – a phrase whose oddity becomes more marked the more you think about it. “The Bible” is a set of very diverse texts bundled together as a canonical unit by Jewish and Christian believers. It is certainly right to protest, as Stavrakopoulou does, when the traces of mythical language are ignored or blandly sanitised by pious reading; but that cannot mean that the mythical substrate is somehow “the real thing” as opposed to what later editors do with these traditions. The idea that the best reading of any text or tradition is one that privileges the oldest stratum needs challenging.

Genesis 5:1–3 echoes Genesis 1:26–27, stating “that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them,” and then adding that Adam had “a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth.” In the book of Moses, this is revised to explicitly refer to the bodilyimage of God: Stavrakopoulou is a remarkable and unusual historian. Her attitude to the Bible in this book is controversial. It has a decidedly anthropological slant. She describes how, three thousand years ago in the Holy Land, the inhabitants knew of many deities, led by a Father God called El. Later, one such deity, known as Yahweh, had a human-shaped body and he possessed feet to walk on. He had a wife, offspring and colleagues. His body changed all the time. At one point, he was virile young, strapping, and emanated red hot light. However, in the book of Daniel, he had a more celestial colour. He had the white hair and the beard of an aged deity who possesses wisdom. Like El, Yahweh was often depicted with horns protruding from His head, symbolizing his taurine strength and ferocity, and often used to scatter His enemies. Through Moses, He imparts these horns to Joseph: 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. 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:

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The clear implication of humanity—both male and female—being created in God’s image is that all men and women are the offspring of God. Halton argues, citing Genesis 5:1–3, “We look like the divine because we are God’s offspring.” 14Prophets and apostles and other servants of the Lord have repeatedly taught the importance of this solemn truth. For instance, President HughB. Brown taught: 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. 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.

She makes two key points. The first is that Christianity and Judaism are not Biblical religions; they are post-Biblical religions. Most of the Hebrew Bible was written in and refers to very different times when the concept of God was very different to the monotheistic Christian and Jewish concepts of God. 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. Music choices include Tallis, Beethoven, Elgar, and Handel’s portrayal of her favourite Biblical heroine, Athalia. We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come to be known as Yahweh. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; by the third century BCE his name had been declared unutterable. We know him best as God.Not a particular take. She just leaves us to decide what we think. So much depends on who the people are. But her view is that it doesn’t seem as if the people who are pulling these statues down really understand the historical milieu in which they were put up. In this book, she draws on her knowledge of Egyptian religion and other south-west Asian religions to help us understand the god of the Bible better. She also draws on her knowledge of Hebrew to show how Christian translators have modified the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. Old Testament), airbrushing elements of the Biblical god that don’t fit in with their theology. As an undergraduate, Francesca Stavrakopoulou observed “lots of biblical texts suggest that God is masculine, with a male body” and was told by her theology professor that these texts were metaphorical, or poetic. “We shouldn’t get too distracted by references to his body,” her professor asserted, because to do so would be “to engage too simplistically with the biblical texts”.