Torah for Christians: Does God Have a Body?
TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS
SEASON 5 EPISODE 15
DOES GOD HAVE A BODY?
I have long longed to write a book called “God’s Body Parts”. If we examaine the Bible carefully, we find evidence of God having feet, hands, a mouth, a back and even a face. Our ancestors clearly applied human characteristics to God. The question is: Did they believe that God had a human form? We’ll explore this question on today’s edition of Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr.
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Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr.
One of the enduring questions of any religion, especially Judaism, is the nature of God. In modern Jewish thought, God is incorporeal, without form, shape, or body. Unlike Christianity, which predicates itself on a Father and his embodied Son, there are no familial relationships.
But this is, as I said, a modern perspective. I’ve always wondered if our modern view of the incorporeal Deity influences our perspective regarding how our ancestors viewed God. Did they think as we did? Or was their view of Deity an anthropomorphic one, where God takes a human form?
I believe it was the latter: God has a body. If so, we did a corporeal God became an incorporeal God?
Let’s go to the text.
In Genesis 3.8, Adam and Eve, now fully self-aware after eating the forbidden fruit, heard “the voice of God walking to and fro in the Garden. God then called to the couple, who was hiding in the bushes, “Where are you?”
In these two verses, we learn that God has a voice and can walk. God has legs, vocal cords, a neck, a tongue, and a mouth. Adam hears God talking; he and God had quite an intense conversation, leading to the couple’s banishment from the Garden of Eden. God must have ears if God listened to Adam.
In Daniel 5.5, we read of the famous writing on the wall. While the story deserves its own analysis, we learn that a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster. This hand appeared out of nowhere and was not attached to a body. It was as if an invisible man stood there and allowed only his hand to show as he wrote on the wall.
So now, we have a throat, a head, feet, and a hand. What else can we find?
Let’s look at Exodus 33.11. In the Golden Calf story, God would speak to Moses “face to face, as one person speaks to another.” Now God has a face. This idea of God speaking to Moses face to face is repeated at the very end of Deuteronomy, when we read of Moses’ death.
Later in the same story, in Exodus 33.18, Moses begs to see God‘s kavod, God’s Glory. But in verse 20, God says that Moses cannot see God’s face and live. Instead, God places Moses in a cleft of the rock and then, in verse 23, Moses is able to see God’s back. So, while there is a contradiction about whether we can see God’s face, clearly God has a face and a back. Head, neck, face, throat, vocal cords, hand, feet. We’re getting close to a full human being.
In the first chapters of Leviticus, we learn that we offer sacrifices to lift up a rai’ach nicho’ach, a pleasing aroma before God. Can God smell these aromas? That may be unclear to us but perhaps the Israelites believed that God could smell – which means that God also has a nose.
But the best example of anthropomorphism is found in Exodus 24. In this passage, God commands Moses to ascend Mount Sinai, along with Aaron, Aaron’s sons and 70 elders of Israel. Jumping to verse 10 of this chapter, we read that they “saw the God of Israel – under whose feet was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire… yet God did not raise a hand … they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”
Here, God has legs and feet. The Israelites behold God sitting on a Divine Throne. And to make matters even crazier, they had a nosh!
There are many more examples of anthropomorphism in the Bible, we just don’t have time to explore them. Isaiah 6, his vision of God sitting on the throne in front of a fireplace, and Psalm 29, singing of the glory, power, and majesty of God’s voice, come to mind.
It’s clear that the Israelites believed in a corporeal God. Their rabbinic descendants might have believed the same way. Let’s look at the idea of God’s fingers, as described by Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, in his work, The Hand of God: A Chapter in Rabbinic Anthropomorphism:
He quotes the 3rd Century CE scholar, Rav, wrote:
When the Holy One, blessed be He, wished to create man, He [first] created a company of ministering angels and said to them: Is it your desire that we make a man in our image? They answered: Sovereign of the Universe, What will be his deeds? - Such and such will be his deeds, He replied. Thereupon they exclaimed: Sovereign of the Universe, 'what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him (Ps 8:4)?' Thereupon He stretched out His little finger among them and consumed them with fire...
The first man reached from one end of the world to the other... But when he sinned, the Holy One, blessed be He, laid His hand upon him and diminished him, as it is written 'Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me' (Ps 139:5).7
This passage is found in the Talmudic Tractate Sanhedrin 38b. Through this Midrash, we learn God’s fingers exist and second, they have power over humans. Note that there is a lot of mysticism associated with this Midrash as well; Kabbalah continued to dive into the idea of God as a physical being long after other Jews abandoned this concept.
After the break, we’ll talk about how and why Jews moved away from anthropomorphism and began to believe in an incorporeal God. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
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Welcome back to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. If you are enjoying this podcast, I encourage you to go to our website, www.torahforchristians.net, where you can find previous episodes, which cover a variety of topics. You can also access them on various podcast websites, such as iTunes, Spotify and Google.
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So how and why did Jews come to embrace an incorporeal God. For the answer, we must look to Moses Maimonides, the great Spanish-Jewish philosopher, who completely reconceptualized Judaism for his day and ours.
Born in Cordoba, Spain, Maimonides moved to Fez, Morocco and later to Cairo, where he became the physician to the Caliph, the Muslim ruler in Cairo. During his lifetime, he wrote a commentary on the Mishneh, a compendium of laws distilled from the Bible and Talmud, called the Mishneh Torah and a great philosophical work, the Moreh Nevuchim, the Guide to the Perplexed, which definitely is the most perplexing book ever written about God and Jewish thought.
Maimonides redefined Biblical anthropomorphism as an attempt by the ancients to personify God because they knew that the masses were incapable of understanding the true nature of God. To this end, he furnished us with a lexicon of Biblical terminology in the Moreh. A few examples will suffice to explain his thinking.
In the Guide (1.10), Maimonides expounds upon the terms alah and yarad. Alah means to go up, like the word Aliyah, to go up to Jerusalem or today, to immigrate to Israel. Yarad means to go down, like the word yarden, the Jordan River, which descends as it meanders toward the Dead Sea. Maimonides writes:
The two words are also applied to intellectual processes, namely, when we reflect on something beneath ourselves, we are said to go down, and when our attention is raised to a subject above us, we are said to rise.
So far, so good. But then he writes:
Now, we occupy a lowly position, both in space and rank in comparison with the heavenly sphere, and the Almighty is Most High not in space, but with respect to absolute existence, greatness, and power. When it pleased the Almighty to grant to a human being a certain degree of wisdom or prophetic inspiration, the divine communication thus made to the prophet and the entrance of the Divine Presence into a certain place is termed (yeridah), “descending,” while the termination of the prophetic communication or the departure of the divine glory from a place is called ‘aliyah, “ascending.”
Now these words take on new meanings. When God wishes to impart revelation, God descends, such as when God descended upon Mount Sinai.
Moses ascended to receive God’s Word. But neither Moses nor us can ascend to God’s level because God is not a body; God is an intellectual concept and so, comprehending God in human form is, to Maimonides, impossible.
Maimonides completely rejected anthropomorphism. Heavily influenced by the recently rediscovered Aristotle, he believed that Biblical words that describe God’s physicality actually refer to God as an intellectual concept. To know God, Maimonides wrote, one had to develop his or her intellect. Then and only then could a person truly comprehend and commune with God.
This idea was best expressed in his 13 Principles of Faith, a catechism for Jews, when he stated that: 1) God exists; 2) God is an absolute unity and 3) God is incorporeal. To buttress this thought, he writes elsewhere that anyone who believes that God has a body is a heretic.
It took time for the Jewish world to embrace Maimonides’ rigid anti-anthropomorphism. Opposition to Maimonides continued even until the 19th Century. Samuel David Luzzatto, a great scholar of his day, defended the idea that God has a body, claiming that an embodied God was the only God conceivable to most people. Even Maimonides seemed to believe that the idea that God had a body was comforting to the masses – but not the truth for the enlightened.
We cannot underestimate Maimonides’ influence. Before Maimonides, anthropomorphism was a common Jewish view of God. After him, God became an incorporeal concept. While not all Jews followed Maimonides, enough did, and changed Jewish thought forever.
Some Jews, especially Kabbalists and some Chasidim, still hold that God has a body. And they may be correct. But if we ask the Jew in the pew what God looks like, he or she will probably laugh at us and say that God has no body. The famous statement that “God is an old, white man with a long, white beard” is an idea for children, who think concretely but for adults, it’s an incomplete or even an inaccurate statement.
But maybe, just maybe, there is truth in that statement. While God may not be male, may not be bearded, and may not be white, God may have bodily form – and that may just be beyond our ability to comprehend the Divine.
I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Please like and review this and all my podcasts on our website, www.torahforchristians.net or on iTunes. You can also subscribe to my Substack column, Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, on the website or directly on Substack.
Next week, we will discuss talk about something a bit lighter in tone: the Jewish holiday of Purim. It will be fun.
Again, thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and I wish you a wonderful week. Hinei Mah Tov… L’hitraot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this has been Torah for Christians.
