God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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Yahweh’s arm was so powerful that with it He turned Leviathan from an awesome chaos demon into a pet to play with (Ps. 104:26). His physical form was said to be exceptionally beautiful, as a passage from the Song of Songs, which may have described a cult statue, attests: Stavrakopoulou has taken to heart the biblical injunction to seek the face of God, and what emerges is a deity more terrifyingly alive, more damaged, more compelling, more complex than we have encountered before. More human, you might say. For us, God is not an abstraction. He is not an idea, a metaphysical principle, an impersonal force or power. He is a concrete, living person. And though in our human frailty we cannot know the total mystery of his being, we know that he is akin to us, … and he is, in fact, our Father. … We reaffirm the doctrine of the ancient scripture and of all the prophets that asserts that man was created in the image of God and that God possessed such human qualities as consciousness, will, love, mercy, justice. In other words, he is an exalted, perfected, and glorified Being. 15

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 God: An Anatomy, written by Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, is very useful. Here, she argues for a corporeal view of God in the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Bible. Numerous passages are provided to support her thesis as she moves from looking at those which focus on his feet, to his legs, torso and finally head. The book is useful for exploring how language about God should be understood (via analogy, symbols, the via negativa or something else). It also provides further thought for units focusing on the attributes of God, especially discussions surrounding whether the philosophical concept of God is supported by the Bible. And when YHWH smelled the pleasing aroma, YHWH said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.’” —(Genesis 8:21)But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.” The Book of Mormon and the book of Moses were translated in 1829 and 1830, respectively. 4Thus, humanity’s physical resemblance to deity was one of the earliest truths restored in modern times—a truth which Joseph Smith himself surely understood even earlier thanks to his First Vision. 5 Yahweh (she seems to hint at, but doesn’t openly embrace, some version of the Midianite hypothesis) is just as embodied as Baal or Marduk. More importantly, he’s just as masculinely male, complete with penis. As part of this, she notes that “hand” as well as “foot” is often a biblical synonym for “penis,” as in other southwest Asian religious works. And Yahweh waves his penis. He wields it. He is procreative with it. Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 6:191–194. In any case, what about Eve’s prior baby-making with Adam? Where, or when, did he come in? This gets glossed over as Stavrakopoulou soars wildly on into speculations about the name “Eve” as merely a title for the goddess Asherah, Asherah being Hebrew for Athirat, the spouse of the pan-Semitic high god El, and El being functionally identical with Yahweh. She infers far too much, but as for the key translation itself, she has warrant for what she does.

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. 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. Furthermore, God commanded the Israelites not to make any graven images of God to bow down and worship (see Exodus 20:3–4; Deuteronomy 4:15–19), at least partially because rather than “dumb idols” (Habakkuk 2:8), God’s true image is manifest in living, breathing persons. 17This means, every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect as children of God and reflections of his image and likeness. As President Joseph Fielding Smith taught, Interestingly, we're never told the amount of the wager. Is it for the Satan to get a day on the throne of Yahweh, a day with his feet on Yahweh's footstool, to riff on discussions by Stavra? Granting for the moment that the translations just cited are accurate, we may well ask nonetheless whether they are good translations. There are times, in other words, when the plain sense is humanly, artistically, psychologically or emotionally just off. Can you imagine a mother exulting over her newborn baby boy with the words, “I have procreated”? Can you imagine a lover swooning poetically over her sweetheart’s gorgeous “genitalia”? I have poetic reservations but Stavrakopoulou has nonetheless written a stunning book.Although Stavrakopoulou is an atheist, she’s fascinated, even perturbed, by what Christians and Jews have done to God. In ancient times, she notes, God had a body, “a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking” physique. Stripping away the theological veneer of centuries of Jewish and Christian piety, this book disentangles the biblical God from his scriptural and doctrinal fetters to reveal a deity wholly unlike the God worshipped by Jews and Christians today. The God revealed in this book is the deity as his ancient worshippers saw him: a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking god, with supra-human powers, earthly passions and a penchant for the fantastic and the monstrous. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. … Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image? Yea, even all men were created in the beginning after mine own image. Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh. (Ether 3:14–16) Stavrakopoulou throws down a heroic crusader’s gauntlet (and takes an indefensible theoretical position) at the very opening of her book: