The extent to which God is depicted anthropomorphically in the Old Testament is striking, given that he is viewed as above and beyond his creation, the high and holy One of many a text in prose and verse. The statement in Deuteronomy 4 that at Horeb the Israelites ‘saw no form of any kind’ on the day God spoke out of the fire (v. 15; cf. v. 12) and the parallel aniconic tradition of tabernacle and temple, where God was enthroned invisibly between the cherubim (cf. 1 Sam. 4:4), certainly reflect a non-corporeal conception of God. On the other hand, the point is made increasingly nowadays that Deuteronomy 4 is a rare text on the subject of God’s incorporeality.48 Moreover, it may be argued that Deut. 4:15 is saying only that God did not manifest his form at Horeb, not that no form could ever be attributed to him. Stephen Geller takes this further, claiming that, whereas the old Deuteronomic thinkers allowed but one breach of divine transcendence, at Horeb, Deut. 4:36 wants to reject even this one concession.49Whatever our views on Deuteronomy 4, we should not globalise its message so as to create an unbridgeable gulf between the God of the Old Testament and the physical world of his making.
To do so would involve the further loss of unnecessarily widen-ing the gap between Old Testament views of God and Christian incarnational theology. One of the most striking anthropomorph-isms in the Old Testament is the ‘angelophany’, in which the an-gel of the Lord appears to favoured humans. When God appears to Gideon it is in the guise of the angel of the Lord sitting
un-48See S.D. Moore, ‘Gigantic God: Yahweh’s Body’, JSOT 70 (1996), 87-115 (92).
49Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 42. According to Geller, Deut. 4 teaches that hearing, rather than seeing, is the proper way to experience revelation (39, 48); the Deuteronomic writers are redefining the nature of God and the process of revelation (40-42); the unique feature of ‘biblical religion’, as of its daughter faiths Judaism and Christianity, is ‘transcendent monotheism’
(170).
der an oak in Ophrah and, apparently, indistinguishable from a human (Judg. 6:22). Gideon does not appreciate the literal po-tential in the greeting ‘The Lord is with you’; nevertheless, the story discloses that it is none other than the Lord himself speak-ing to Gideon (Judg. 6:11-24 [14]). It is as a ‘man of God’ that God, initially introduced in the story as ‘the angel of the Lord’, appears to Manoah’s wife (Judg. 13:3, 6, 9, 13, 19-22). The ap-pearance of God to Abraham in Genesis 18 belongs here, even though the chapter does not mention angels or the angel of the Lord.50Abraham is confronted by three ‘men’, who eat his food, and, it becomes apparent, one of those who enjoys his hospital-ity is ‘the Lord’ (vv. 13, 17). Similarly, it is as a man that God encounters Jacob at Peniel, and Jacob at the end recognises that he has seen God face to face (Gen. 32:30).
As we know, there is a tendency within traditional Christian exegesis to identify the ‘angel of the Lord’ with the second per-son of the Trinity, though the New Testament itself noticeably refrains from this in the martyr Stephen’s reference to the angel of the Lord at the burning bush (Acts 7:30-34). Such Christo-phanic emphasis results from exegetical overkill, however, and its effect is to obscure a serious point of contact between the two Testaments: the compatibility of the biblical God with human form. Alter goes to the other extreme in claiming that in the Old Testament there is, ‘despite anthropomorphism’, an ‘abso-lute cleavage between man and God’: ‘man cannot become God and God (in contrast to later Christian developments) does not become man’.51 As ontology such a statement is pointless in an Old Testament context,52while the absoluteness of the ‘absolute cleavage’ depends precisely on the limits observed in the anthro-pomorphising in the biblical texts. In the Old Testament, as we have already seen, anthropomorphism is taken quite far.
Paying anthropomorphism its due respect will have repercus-sions for our reading of the biblical text more generally, as may be illustrated from the first page of the Bible. It is the anthro-pomorphised God who creates the universe in Genesis 1. There is a tendency to emphasise the fiat aspect of the creation (‘God
50In 19:1, 15, on the other hand, the other two visitants who continued on to Sodom are called ‘angels’ (or ‘messengers’).
51Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 157.
52Alter’s contrasting of Christianity, according to which God does ‘become man’, shows the sense in which he (presumably) intends this ‘becoming’.
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 61
said, “Let there be . . . ” ’), as if this expressed a distinctive Is-raelite standpoint. However, we know that fiat creation is also a feature of Egyptian Memphite ‘creation theology’, and Gen-esis 1 is actually stronger on the idea of the ‘workman God’, not least when it comes to the creation of the first humans. This may have a bearing on the statement in verse 26 about God’s making humans ‘in our image’, for this strangely abstract phrasing – at least in an Old Testament setting, and as most often expounded – may not be so devoid of corporeality as is often assumed.53 If the language of the Divine Council lies behind the use of the first person plural in the verse, as is widely believed, then there is even more reason for our interpretation of ‘image’ and ‘like-ness’ to avoid theological abstraction – this perhaps encouraged by other Old Testament passages which associate God with some sort of corporeal existence, even where the ‘angelophany’ is not involved.54
What we have in the Old Testament is a depiction of God that is as developed and multiplex as that of any human char-acter described there. This relates very directly to the aptitude of the biblical writers for characterisation in narrative: God as a narrative protagonist is treated according to the same literary conventions as the human participants in the narratives. It would be a large claim that characterisation developed in the Old Test-ament literature in a way unparalleled elsewhere, but a good case could be made. So God himself is depicted with an astonishing range of characteristics and responses to the people and situ-ations described in the biblical narratives. Now, while the danger of the unwarranted comparison lurks again, it is, nevertheless, a fair question whether the personality of any other god in the an-cient near east has been so developed, and so anthropomorphised in the process, as that of the God of Israel.
53This may apply even if the beth essentiae approach is favoured (i.e. ‘as our image’ [v. 26; cf. v. 27]).
54See R. Kasher, ‘Anthropomorphism, Holiness and Cult: A New Look at Ezekiel 40-48’, ZAW 110 (1998), 192-208 (192-4). See further M.C.A. Korpel, A Rift in the Clouds: Ugaritic and Hebrew Descriptions of the Divine (UBL, 8), M¨unster 1990, as well as J.C. de Moor, ‘The Duality in God and Man: Gen.
1:26-27 as P’s Interpretation of the Yahwistic Creation Account’, in: J.C. de Moor (ed.), Intertextuality in Ugarit and Israel: Papers Read at the Tenth Joint meeting of The Society for Old Testament Study and Het Oudtesta-mentisch Werkgezelschap . . . Oxford, 1997 (OTS, 40), Leiden 1998, 112-25.