Dan Snow's History Hit - God's Changing Body Through History

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

While many traditions regard God to be incorporeal, some three thousand years ago in the Southwest Asian lands, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a deity, known as Yahweh. Yahweh had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals. He gorged on food and wine, wrote books, and took walks and naps. But he would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions.Author of ‘God: An Anatomy’ and Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, Francesca Stavrakopoulou is today’s guest on the podcast. Examining God’s body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, Francesca and Dan discuss how the Western idea of God developed, the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world and not only the origins of our oldest monotheistic religions, but also the origins of Western culture.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. God. Yeah, it's a big one folks. What did he look like? Who is God? What is he? When I was young we were told that it was childlike to think that God was an old man with a beard, that was just silly. And yet I've just read the brilliant professor of theology at Exeter University, Francesca Stavrokopoulou's new analysis of God and his anatomy, And frankly, it's blown my mind. She takes us all the way back to the Old Testament and beyond. She analysed where did God come from? Initially, it turns out he was one of a pantheon of deities in the ancient Near East. And he got picked out. He got chosen. His number was drawn. and he eventually came to exclude all the other gods until he became a mono-god. Now, you'll be very surprised to learn that in times past,

people had fairly clear ideas about what God did look like. They even discussed the size of his penis. So this is a warning, folks. If you don't want to hear us discussing the size of God's penis, don't listen to this podcast because this is happening now. Francesca Savacopoglu has been on the podcast many times. She is the famous atheist who loves the Bible. She has been talking about Easter and Christmas in the past and we thought it'd be a seasonal treat to get her on now talking about God, his bod, in all its majesty. So buckle up, folks. It's a few days to go till Christmas. If you're looking for a present, don't forget to go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, or just type historyhit shop into Google, and you will be able to gift History Hit TV this Christmas. I urge you to do so for many reasons, one of which is we've got an action-packed 2022. We're digging up a medieval king. Well,

we're going to look for a medieval king. Fingers crossed, we're going to look for a medieval king. We might even find him. We're going to be excavating on the Western Front. We're going to look for Medieval King. Fingers crossed. We're going to look for Medieval King. We might even find him. We're going to be excavating on the Western Front. We are going to be visiting some of the most inaccessible places on planet Earth. Big announcement coming soon. So this is the year that you need to subscribe. You've been waiting. Now's your chance. Go for it. Historyhit.tv. Sign up today. You get 14 days free. If you don't like it, you don't have to pay anything in the meantime though here is francesca stavro capolu enjoy francesca thanks very much coming back on the podcast thank you for having me you know your

early episodes we did back in 15 16 there's some of those popular episodes of the podcast ever i know like who'd have thought that that the Bible and religion would still be so intriguing to sensible, intellectual people? Yeah, I like the listeners to this podcast. We are going to talk on this podcast, worryingly, about God's genitals. But I think the place to start, I mean, wow. The place to start, though, I love your backstory. I love your little description of you as a little girl. Just quickly tell me about how did you become the world's most famous atheist who loves the Bible?

I'm half Greek and half English. And as a kid, I wasn't brought up religious at all. But as a kid, I was really interested in ancient Greek myths and legends and traditions and stuff. So I used to love reading about these particular characters. And the gods were so multicoloured and multidimensional and fun. And I didn't understand why everyone made such a big fuss about Jesus, because it seemed to me that he was clearly kind of made in that mould where, you know, he had a god as a father, a human as a mother. And I didn't understand why everyone treated him differently and why all these other great kind of

And I didn't understand why everyone treated him differently and why all these other great kind of semi-divine heroes of Greek and Roman mythology had kind of disappeared, leaving what seemed to me at the time to be quite a boring guy, getting all the attention in our own society. So, yeah, I got really interested in religion and found out that Jesus was Jewish when I was at school, which completely blew my mind. So I wanted to find out more about earliest Christianity and its ancient Jewish kind of context and then went to university and basically went to uni to sort of find out more about, you know, did Jesus actually exist? And if he did, what did he do? And why was he executed and all that kind of stuff? And in the process of doing that, just discovered the Hebrew Bible or what in Christianity is known as the Old Testament.

In Judaism, it's known as Tanakh. I found that the Hebrew Bible was like much more exciting than the New Testament. And so I just carried on studying because it fascinates me why people are religious and the sorts of claims that they make and what it says about us as human beings, I think. about us as human beings, I think. And you are sort of famous for historicising the Old Testament, the Bible, which we're not going to do today, which obsesses many people, like did King David exist? And if he did exist, what does it mean?

And what was the space occupied by the biblical kingdom? But let's not do that today, because today you're going to talk about something else, which is, I didn't know, like God had a body. Yeah. Until when did God have a body? And by the way, it's so complicated because Jesus is also God, but the Old Testament God before Jesus was incarnate as well. Yeah, I mean, in the sense that, as any other kind of deity in ancient Southwest Asia, so what we call today the Middle East, you know, the gods routinely were understood to have bodies.

Divine bodies were basically human-shaped, just as human bodies were divine-shaped. I've seen them on Instagram. I look at them on Instagram every day. Divine human-shaped bodies. Exactly. And they were. They were kind of like these very hyper-glamorous, very charismatic, sometimes monstrous, sometimes staggeringly beautiful divine beings. And this was the world into which the ancient God of the Bible emerged. I mean, he started off as a very minor storm deity and sort of rose through the ranks of the Southern Levantine pantheon and ended up as kind of being the deity who a lot of people call God today. But he was always understood to have a body. It's just

that in most of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible traditions, you know, that body is referred to, sometimes it's described, but quite often it's a body that's deliberately hidden or concealed from humans. So in the Ten Commandments, when God says, you know, you shall not make an image of anything in the heavens or above or the earth below, etc, etc. A lot of people just assume that's because this was a god who didn't have a body, therefore he couldn't be made, you know, you couldn't make a cultic statue of this god as other peoples would make statues of their gods. But that's not the case. The context of that particular regulation, the Ten Commandments, is not that he didn't have a body or that, you know, he was immaterial or incorporeal. It's just that

he hid his body ordinarily from the world and only allowed certain special human beings to glimpse it. So we've got lots of stories of Moses seeing God, Adam and Eve seeing God, Abraham, Jacob, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of that continues all the way through to the early common era, the period that we associate with the rise of the Jesus movement, which would become Christianity. And even at the time of Jesus, people still would ordinarily assume that God have a body. It's just that nobody really saw it again. The sensational aspect of his body was that he had occasionally, in the distant past, allowed people to see it. Sorry, can I just pick you up on the whole storm god thing?

Yeah! So where did God come from? past allowed people to see it. Sorry, can I just pick you up on the whole storm god thing? Yeah. So where did God come from? Well, quite possibly, like some of the earliest poetry in the Bible sort of depicts him as this ferocious storm god associated with a very mountainous wilderness region, which is in the Hebrew Bible, it seems to be in a place then known as Edom, which is now Southern Jordan, basically. So that's probably where this deity Yahweh was first understood to have dwelt but and it was cast very much as the kind of

a place at the very edges of the civilized world at the very edges it was a very dangerous place and as a storm god he had a whole arsenal of weapons you know thunder lightning all that kind of stuff so he was a warrior because quite often storm gods were warrior deities using that arsenal of kind of cosmic weaponry against their enemies, both mortal and cosmic enemies. He was a bit of a dude. A bit like Zeus and Thor. I mean, if you've got the thunderbolt, you're winning really. Yeah, exactly. Very much like Zeus. And so you now, you've pieced together all the references to what he looked like. It's incredible. Like you've gone to all of the bits of it.

Now, is it just that, you've mentioned this a little bit, within the Jewish tradition, is it writings surrounding that or is it just what's been embodied in what we would call the Old Testament? It's both. It's focused on the God of the Bible. So both the Old Testament and the New Testament, because we can't really distinguish the point where these texts in the New Testament were written. So we're talking about from the period, say, the mid-first century to the early second century CE. It's hard to talk about Christianity as its own religion. It's still very much a subset of different forms of Judaism. And the Bible itself wasn't really compiled, as it were, until later than that. So these are early

Jewish traditions, both Christian and Jewish, if you see what I mean. But yeah, the book kind of focuses on the God of the Bible. So both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, but sets that within its broader cultural context. So I draw on all sorts of archaeological, visual, cultural stuff, social theory, anthropology, going all the way back to kind of some neolithic and chalcolithic periods I also go up into sort of I suppose like I don't know 15th century European stuff so it's kind of wide-ranging but what I'm trying to do is to contextualize this god so I'm looking at how is this deity portrayed in biblical texts and how did this deity kind of

become the god of the bible and i do that by basically anatomizing him starting with his feet and i work all the way up to his face to kind of tell the story of the development of this particular deity i thought you were just going to drop uh the council of nicaea on us there i got very excited yeah yeah that crops up and constantinople and yeah. I'll bet. Okay, here we go. So let's get away from that,

like working out what things should be in the Bible and what things shouldn't. So let's start. Tell me about his feet. Yeah. What do you think of God's feet? Well, feet are really interesting because in the ancient world, the idea for anyone or anything to exist

is to be materially, tangibly placed somehow in the world and so you know the point about gods is i mean you know let's be completely frank here they're imaginary beings right and so to have a social relationship with an imaginary being whether it's the dead your dead ancestors or a deity some kind of divine power to socialize to have that social relationship you somehow have to have some kind of tangible link with that. So, you know, so think about what we do with our dead. We don't just throw away the bodies of our dead. We kind of memorialise them, but we also kind of materialise the memory, if you like, the place, the presence of those dead ancestors or relatives in our continuing lives. We go and visit graves or we take flowers or whatever it is. And in some ways,

ancient religions quite similar. There's a sense in which to have a social relationship with an imaginary being, certain places and practices, material sensory experiences are really important. And so God's feet are really crucial to his social placement in the world. They were very much understood that holy places, so where you build a temple, where you build an altar, that ground is already sacred by very virtue of the fact that the deity is understood to stand there or dwell there. So his feet mark place in a very territorial sense, but they also mark presence in a very social sense. So some of the earliest cult places are associated with standing stones and deities themselves were identified with these stones that stood up like a person. So yeah, it's about the

idea that the feet of both gods and mortals are very sensory objects, parts of our bodies, and that you experience in the world in ways very different from we do today. You know, you use your feet not just to walk about, but to make things, you know, basket weaving, treading manure and treading grapes, but also measuring distance, measuring time all by your feet. And so the feet were really important. And we see Yahweh doing all sorts of things with his feet. He talks about the Jerusalem temple as being the place for the soles of my feet, where I will dwell forever. This is where I rest my feet. for the soles of my feet where I will dwell forever. This is where I rest my feet. The Ark of the Covenant is his footstool at the base of his throne, for example. So yeah, the feet play all sorts of important sensory roles. When Moses goes up Mount Sinai, he sees God's feet resting

on his sky pavement. It's beautiful. It's described as this kind of lapis lazuli, so this kind of deep cosmic blue pavement on which God's feet the soles of his feet are resting so it's about social presence but feet are also organs of social and political power so all over Mesopotamia and in Egypt and you know right up until sort of the Roman period kings often talk about trampling their enemies with their feet you will fall under my feet they pin them down underneath their sandals Tutankhamun's ceremonial sandals had the bodies of his trussed up enemies on the insoles of his shoes so that he was constantly trampling his enemies. And so feet played this really important ideological role in the ancient world. So

yeah, Yahweh does an awful lot of stuff with his feet, which is mainly about power and presence. Well, speaking of presence, that reminds me of William Blake's poem and did those feet in ancient times walk upon England. Yeah, so it's rare. I've never thought about that. It's fascinating.

Okay, let's get this done. Let's talk about the kernels. What do we know about God's Winky? So what we know about God's Winky is that Winky suggested it was quite small and petite and sort of prepubescent and his wasn't. He was a very... Oh, you amaze me.

You amaze me. His acolyte said he had a really big cock. That's really... Pretty much. I'm really surprised by that. But that's the thing. When you think about ancient Greek and Roman statuary, we've been brought up in this culture,

we've been brought up on thinking that a god has a very civilised, modest, polite penis. They're very small and kind of neat and tidy yeah polite penis i like that i'm gonna use yeah yeah in all sorts of contexts but in the ancient world before that so in ancient southwest asia male gods were fertility deities i mean fertility wasn't strictly something that we associate with goddesses it was a male attribute of male deities. And to be a good fertility god, you needed a big cock with lots of semen. And we get glimpses of this in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, when Yahweh is described as kind of impregnating

the land of Jezreel. He also has sex with his wife in the book of Ezekiel, who's sort of Israel personified, but it's a baby girl that he sort of grooms basically until she reaches puberty and then sort of has intercourse with her and has children with her. The prophet Ezekiel has this image of God sitting on his throne and his whole body is concealed with this kind of cosmic fire going up from his mot naim and down from his mot naim. And so it's mot naim that Ezekiel sees. And this is a word that is usually translated as loins, but actually pretty much means genitals. And so this prophet kind of navigates his way around this deity's body by sort of talking about his genitalia, basically. So God was well equipped. I mean,

and he was circumcised. Early rabbis in, you know, sort of the early centuries of the common era, they had these huge debates. They worried so much about certain biblical characters who existed before Abraham. So it's Abraham that God first says, you know, I want you to circumcise yourself, to circumcise all the males in your household. And they worried that the circumcision a really important sign of the covenant between God and his people but they was like what about Abraham because you know what about Noah because he's not said to be circumcised and what about Adam you know was he circumcised was he created circumcised and the rabbis said well of course he was because we're told in the bible in Genesis that God created man in his image and said, so if he was created in God's image,

then surely he was circumcised because God is circumcised too. So the early rabbis were completely comfortable with the idea that God had a dick and that obviously it was circumcised. If you listen to Dinosaur's History, I'm talking about God's body with the Atheist Who Loves the Bible. More coming up. talking about God's body with the Atheist Who Loves the Bible. More coming up.

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Murder. Rebellions. and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. the god wife thing is something that's been edited out of the as well as penis becoming loins i must say i've always been aware of the word loins when you go to someone's christian wedding or i remember being at school i would i thought loins feels euphemistic to me i think it is euphemistic and so much of the bible is every translation is an interpretation of course it is you get the biblical writers reverently concealing bits of god's body or revealing bits of god's body but equally you get later translators both in the ancient world and in the modern day

sort of politely concealing things assuming that well this can't possibly mean genitals because loins is more what polite sometimes you find it rendered as kind of middle or waist even but it's not i mean this is this is very much about you know the front fleshy bits like on the genital area between the hips so yeah loins is a very polite word but when it comes to god's wife i mean we've got lots of references to the goddess asherah in biblical texts and she's presented as being a goddess who's worshipped alongside Yahweh in his temples. The biblical writers are furious about this. They're saying, oh, it's an abomination to do that. But then in the 60s and 70s, various inscriptions were found

that refer to Yahweh and Asherah and seem to suggest that they were worshipped as a pair. And so most scholars now in my field would agree that the goddess Asherah was his consort. So he had a wife in that sense. But then this language of the wife of God, once you kind of get a shift away from polytheism towards monotheism, when a lot of these ancient biblical texts were being created, Yahweh doesn't lose his status as a divine husband. He then becomes divine husband, if you like, to his people. Just as like, you know, even when he loses his body theologically centuries and centuries later, all of that language of the body still remains, is still used increasingly metaphorically. So we talk about God's face or God hears us or, you know, God reaches out his hand or whatever.

So none of that stuff disappears. It's sort of reworked. And so in some biblical traditions, you get various characters cast as God's wife. And in the book of Ezekiel, as in the books of Hosea and Jeremiah, the people, his followers themselves, the nation is personified as a woman, a young girl whom Yahweh adores and has a sexual relationship with and has children with, and then brutalises and punishes because he accuses her of being unfaithful to him with foreign gods and foreign nations. And it's horrific stuff. I mean, it's horrific material to read. It's almost pornographic in how graphic it is. It's hugely violent. It's misogynistic. The sexual violence is horrific against that he performs against this female

character it's all there in the bible but again quite often these things are either softened in translation sometimes they're not even read at all some of these bits in ezekiel early rabbis banned it from public reading in synagogues because it was so difficult theologically and ethically and quite often some of this stuff isn't read in christian services for example you can say that again i've never heard it even though i'm not a regular church coat must be said let's get to the torso i'm guessing i'm guessing francesca he had a well-muscled torso yeah i think he was pretty buff like you know this is pretty ahead yeah exactly this is the deity who's kind of is primarily a warrior. And so he's a lean,

mean fighting machine. But his torso is also really interesting is because his torso is really where his emotions and his cognitive organs are located. So we tend to think of the brain as the centre of our cognitive experience. But in the ancient world, it was the heart that was the organ, the cognitive organ, that's where thought and reason and intellect were located. And it was in the belly and the bowels that emotions were felt, love and fear and that kind of stuff. So, yeah, he's a well-built deity, but he's also got this kind of soft, fluffy centre. He can be very parental in his love and very compassionate. And all of that stuff is felt in his belly and in his bowels. I mean, there's one passage in Jeremiah where he

starts having heart palpitations and he's kind of getting spasms in his stomach and he's got a really bad tummy ache because of the grief that he feels that he's about to destroy his people. So his torso is really interesting. It kind of gets you into the inner character of this biblical God. Well, since we're there, let's do arms. You've mentioned hands, torso is really interesting it kind of gets you into the inner character of this biblical god well since we're there let's do arms you've mentioned hands arms and hands again i'm guessing you know pretty manly pretty firm grip on the old handshake yeah absolutely lots of weaponry loads of biblical examples of him stretching out his hand and smiting his enemies and punching monsters and cutting them up and all

that kind of stuff. But he can also be a very tender deity. So this is a God who sort of describes birthing children. He acts as a midwife. He pulls children, newborn babies out and cradles them in his arms. He also digs a grave for Moses. I mean, this is a God who's like us. He does all sorts of things with his arms and hands, and it's his hands that are the most sort of, almost like the most social parts of him. So there's this incredible ancient site called Dura Europus in Syria, which was on the very eastern edge of the Roman Empire. And in the mid third century BCE, it was attacked by Sasanian invaders. And in order to kind of stave off the attack,

they tried to kind of bank up the city walls with these huge mud banks. The city was defeated. But when archaeologists excavated in the early 20th century, they uncovered these staggering buildings, including what was probably one of the earliest churches, Christian churches.

But they also found a synagogue. And in that synagogue were floor-to-ceiling frescoes depicting scenes from the Bible. You've got Abraham trying to sacrifice Isaac and all that kind of stuff. But in lots of these scenes, you've got images of God's long brown arms and hands stretching out. So when he's passing the sea for the Israelites to cross over as they come out of Egypt into the Promised Land, he's got these beautiful, long, sl arms and people used to say oh this is just a motif that's been adapted from you know Roman iconography this hand descending from the heavens but actually this ancient Jewish community in this third century CE synagogue in Syria they were depicting, it's a very faithful artistic depiction of what

their texts talk about. The texts talk about these great hands and arms of God who liberate them and fights for them and blah, blah, blah. So it's a really extraordinary, the extent to which this body imagery of God continues, even at the point in the third century CE, when you think that that ban on divine images in particular would be in full effect effect but it wasn't at all what about his head and face what's he look like i keep thinking about renaissance gods i keep thinking about the michelangelo kind of michelangelo which is a little bit little mermaid as well her dad triton that sort of lovely beard always gives me a bit of hope because they've always got white hair but whilst they're also very muscly and handsome as well but they're clearly in their 50s

if not early 60s which makes me think i've got a few years left you better start growing that beard though it's gonna take a while but yeah they look a bit like father christmas don't like a young father christmas yeah I talk about god going gray because in sort of the earlier period in the iron age god had red skin he had beautiful bluey black hair a a lovely, very carefully groomed beard. But then gradually, he starts in about the second century BCE, he suddenly goes grey. And basically, there's two things going on. One is the idea that the brightness and lightness of the stars was very much divine light. The gods were understood to kind of have this aura around them, this radiance emanating out from their bodies. It's called kavod in Hebrew

or melamu in some Mesopotamian texts. And it's basically like this radiance, this divine radiance, which gives them this kind of glowing, hot, sometimes hot, sometimes bright white light. And in the second century BCE, this kind of divine brightness begins gradually to morph into a kind of divine whiteness or greyness. So the prophet Daniel sees God sitting on his throne and he's got white, white, white hair and his beard is white as snow and his hair is white as snow. And it's the sense that this bright white of holiness, if you like, has changed how he looks. So he's gone from having this red skin and black hair to being this white robed, white you like, has changed how he looks. So he's gone from having this red skin and black hair to being this white robed, white haired, white bearded deity. And the white beard was

something that God's dad had. His dad, Eyal, was in much older texts of the late Bronze Age, depicted as having this long white beard that sat on his chest. But as Yahweh rose up through the ranks and became the senior deity, he kind of maintains some of his kind of youthful masculinity. But he starts to acquire this white beard and white hair of this kind of a wise, eternal, aged deity. And so you've got those two things being brought together in this passage in the book of Daniel. So this white bearded God. And that's the kind of image that Christianity picks up when they're trying to distinguish between God and Jesus. Like, you know, Jesus is the son of God, therefore God is the father. And so in that senior role, he's given this kind of white beard iconographically. So originally, he starts off as a young, really, really good looking, dark haired, black bearded deity with

red skin. And then gradually, by the time of Jesus, he's looking like this ageist scholar or wise old king, a sage that sits on a throne with a big white beard and white hair. Old enough to be all-knowing, young enough to still cut a dash. Yeah. Like he hasn't lost his virility. Yeah, exactly. He hasn't lost his virility. But then obviously, when it comes to the Jesus traditions,

you know, when he conceives jesus um he does say through mary's ear which is a whole other podcast i'm like yeah yeah that's a whole that's a bit zeus and athena isn't it yeah there's some like so it's the idea that basically one of the clouds that he covers himself with he sort of moves over her body and it's so the cloud is almost like it's a bit like a sky escalator i suppose it's the similar cloud that jesus goes up and down on when he ascends into heaven and stuff but he overshadows her he overpowers her that's the language in the greek and it's using this language of clouds which bit of the bible is that in so this is in the gospels when the cloud of god

overshadows mary and she becomes pregnant but they understood that it's the spirit of God that sort of impregnates her. But this was understood to be this kind of emanation from him that wasn't like an immaterial kind of magical substance. It was an airy but a material kind of wind or breath. So in some early traditions, you get the sense that when the angel Gabriel speaks to her, God sort of is blowing or speaking into her ears as she hears it. And that's what impregnates her. It's quite interesting. It's quite bonkers when you think about it. But there are all sorts of other stories. This wasn't just peculiar to the figure of Jesus. I mean, certain other heroes in the Greco-Roman world were similarly said to be kind of conceived through this mysterious sort of pneumatic matter that was

like swirling around from the heavens and kind of enveloping humans and impregnating them. It seems like miasma is quite a useful pre-modern catch-all term. You know, it makes you sick, it makes you pregnant, makes you dead, you know. Yeah, exactly. But it's very much a substance, not this kind of immaterial thing. I guess the reason this is all blowing my mind is because i've been raised in the tradition of monotheism and we were specifically told growing up when i was at school i remember the guy with now first of all if you think it's god as a man with a white beard in the cloud think again you know you're stupid children like i remember we

that was kind of laughed at specifically called out yeah and yet what you're describing is i guess is a god of the kind we recognize in the ancient near east in ancient greece was kind of laughed at, specifically called out. Yeah. And yet what you're describing is, I guess, is a God of the kind we recognise in the ancient Near East, in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome. Like this is, in terms of the contemporary scene, this is very, I guess it's normal, right, to have a God with a body and relationships and anger and temper and... Exactly.

And I think that's the thing is, it's that because in some ways the Bible, and particularly Christianity, and its theologies, and the way in which those have kind of really shaped modern Western ideas about what divinity is, it's about the exceptionalism of this God, you know, this God is presented as being completely different from all the other gods of other foreign peoples, like all the other gods of these barbarians, you know, these are not really gods, this is what God is really like. Even in the Old Testament, you kind of get the sense that, you know, are not really gods this is what god is really like even in the old testament you

kind of get the sense that you know when they're told that it's stupid and foolish and rebellious to create statues of deities because that's what other peoples do and the biblical writers say but they're gods they have feet but they can't walk they have hands but can't feel they have noses but they can't breathe they have mouths and they can't speak and the point is that they can kind of diss those statues because what the biblical writers say is that what our god has feet and he can walk and our god has hands and he can feel and our god has a nose and he can breathe and he can smell so it's that sense of wanting to make this god so exceptional that somehow he can't possibly be like the other deities of other peoples but of course course he was because, you know, this was a very common way in the cultural landscape. This was completely normal to imagine deities like this. I mean, they still had their really mysterious, very otherworldly

concepts. I mean, you know, originally the God of the Bible was a horned deity. He had horns. I mean, we tend to think of horns as devilish and nightmarish creatures. But originally, you know, this was a bovine kind of deity who sometimes could appear in a human shaped form, but sometimes he could appear as a bull. And there are some cult statues that seem to be representing Yahweh and some of his contemporaries like Eyal and Baal as bulls. And so, you know, there was still plenty of scope for the completely otherworldly but in his human-like form he was this kind of masculine guy bearded fully equipped with a working penis and yeah it was very normal in that context francesca as ever you've blown my mind your book is called god i'm looking at right now's on my shelf. I'm enjoying it very much. An anatomy. How's your inbox?

Yeah, it's kind of crazy at the moment. Pretty lively. Yeah, it's lively. But, you know, but great. I had a really nice tweet the other day from somebody that said, I never knew I was interested in religious history and I never knew that the Bible was so interesting. And, you know, I'm a complete atheist. I've written the book for those people, the people who, like me, aren't believers. But I want to show people like this

stuff is really cool and it's really interesting and it's really fun. And it does change the way that we can think about some of the assumptions that people like, you know, the Donald Trumps of this world impose on us, thinking that the Bible is somehow, you know, this is the word of God and that God is made in their own image. I start the book with this e-fit produced by scientists at the University at Chapel Hill. And it's an experiment designed to say to US Christians of various denominations and ethnicities and genders, etc. You know, what's your mental image of God? And they conducted this experiment in 2018. And they created God's ephit as a result of it. And, you know, it turns out that in America,

God is a white middle-aged guy. I mean, we make God's in our own image. And what I'm trying to show is that what image of God did the biblical writers have? And well, this is what he looked like. Well, it's brilliant. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Thank you. I've never had the history on our shoulders back on the podcast Francesca, good luck with it Thanks folks for listening to this episode of Danston's History, as I tell you all the time I love doing these podcasts they are the best thing I do professionally I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd

really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. you