The Ancients - The Image of God

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

Often pictured with a flowing white beard, looking down from Heaven - why is God always seen as an old man? In today's episode, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, whose latest book 'God: an Anatomy' has been shortlisted for the Wolfson prize, is here to debunk those images. Using archaeological material and resources, she answers the question - did God always have a body? With depictions that change across the millenia; from a scandalous view of his backside, to an unfaithful wife, and a body that likes to take evening strolls - just what did God look like?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's the entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, where we've covered big topics in the past, we're going to continue to cover big topics going forwards. And today's no exception, because as you'd have guessed from the title of this episode, we're talking all about the body of God, of Yahweh, of God from the Hebrew Bible. Because

my guest today is Dr. Francesca Stavrokopoulou. Francesca, she's a brilliant academic and also she's a lovely person to chat to. She has recently written a new book called God and Anatomy, and that book is now in contention for the Wolfson History Prize. So we've got Francesca on the podcast today to explain all about her new book. And she explains how the ancient worshippers of Yahweh, of God from the Hebrew Bible, believed that God had a human body. He had this superhuman body, he had hands, he had legs, he had feet, he had footprints, he had a torso, he had hair, he had a face and he also

had genitalia. Francesca explains all in this podcast episode and I really do hope you enjoy. It was wonderful to get her on the pod and without further ado to talk all about the body of God. Here's Francesca. Francesca, it is great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. Now, this is a very big topic. I mean, God's body is just the title of my notes. I've got my sheet in front of me. But I mean, it seems we've got evidence in the ancient texts in the Bible itself that ancient worshippers, or they viewed God as having a human

body, a deity with a body. And is it fair to say a very, very virile one at that? Yeah, we have this tendency to assume that the God of the Bible was always understood to be immaterial, incorporeal, body free. And therefore, some people would argue today, some theologians would say, you know, gender free, sex free. But yeah, that's not the case. Originally, in the early career, if you like, of this deity, when many of these biblical texts were being composed and edited, yeah, he was absolutely understood to have a body and to have a human-shaped body. And it was a human-shaped body with very male, masculine features. It's so interesting, the early career of the Hebrew God. Nice words there. I mean,

it is very interesting what you mentioned. So the source material for this, from what you mentioned, it's not some obscure text. The sources are actually from the Bible itself. Yeah. So in the book that I've written, I explore all sorts of different sources for trying to reconstruct and better understand the ways in which ancient worshippers viewed this deity. But a huge amount of my material comes from the Bible itself. And we tend to think of the Bible as being a single book, because that's the way that we're commonly used to seeing it, a bound volume. But the Bible's not a book at all. It's more like an anthology, a collection of different ancient texts that have been, you know, composed and compiled and edited and reshaped and reworked over centuries and centuries. And so it's those sorts of

different, often competing traditions that have been brought together. But cutting across loads of those is very much this sense that this was a God with a body. And is that one of the difficulties when approaching a topic like this, from what you're saying, that the Bible, it's not intended to be a coherent account of the past? As you say, you have these different strings all attached. Is that one of the difficulties when approaching a topic like this or one of the joys of it? Yeah, joy is probably a good word for it because it's a bit like being a detective and a time traveller and a kind of an archaeologist in the sense that there's a big difference. There's a big difference. You know, scholars would generally agree that there's a huge difference between the likely historical realities of these ancient cultures that gave rise to the biblical

traditions and the portrayal of the past in those biblical traditions. They're two very different things. A lot of the biblical texts that we have were written, probably some of the earliest that we have were written in around the 8th century BCE and some of the later material in the Hebrew Bible what Christian people call the Old Testament the latest traditions are about the 2nd century BCE but then on top of that you've got the traditions that we find in the New Testament which come from the middle of the 1st century of the Common Era into about the early 2nd century Common Era so you know you're talking about a huge period of time. And during that time, these particular texts and traditions, they weren't the only ones that were circulating around the ancient world, circulated by Yahweh worshippers, you know, so tend to think of these as first ancient Israelites.

And then, you know, that kind of gives rise to a form of early Judaism, which then in turn gives rise to this particular cult of Jesus of Nazareth, which would later become Christianity. So these weren't the only authoritative texts and traditions, but they would become the most important, the most authoritative for ideological as well as theological reasons. And lastly, before we really delve into some of these stories themselves, I'm really getting to the meat of this all. You mentioned also that the Bible is a key source, but you did look at other sources as well surrounding it when the book and for this whole topic so what types of sources are we talking here oh some of my very favorite things so a lot of archaeological artifacts from both from ancient israel and you know throughout its whole kind of long period but also from neighboring cultures so across ancient southwest asia so mesopotamian cultures, also some Egyptian cultures, looks at a lot of anthropology and sociology too. So yeah,

it's a very visual book in the sense that, you know, I'm trying to describe and to analyse and to kind of culturally account for this deity. And you can't do that just with text alone. You know, we're a very text-centric culture. We tend to think that if it's written down that therefore it must be more authoritative or more impactful than other sorts of media but yeah the visual media was hugely important in the ancient world and so there's lots of cool artifacts that I talk about as well. Now I can also imagine and what I love about this sorry going on a slight tangent already but the fact that when you're looking at these sources from other cultures that you have surviving that I'm presuming these are polytheistic cultures so in those aspects where you have polytheism in regards to looking at this one god it must be quite interesting to seeing how there's this overlap here between let's say a religion that

we think of monotheistic but also this polytheistic context background to it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the god Yahweh, because that's the deity we're talking about, he was very much a product of his wider cultural environment. And he started off as a god very much rooted into a polytheistic network. You know, it looks like he wasn't the original god of what we call the ancient Israelites. That was probably God's dad, the deity known as El. But Yahweh gradually kind of rose up through the ranks of the pantheon to become the head of the local pantheons of ancient Israel. But, you know, even when he was like, had become the top God, top dog, Yahweh worship was originally polytheistic. It was a very normative way of understanding these networks

of deities. So, you know, he had a wife, the goddess Asherah. And we have Hebrew inscriptions from the 8th century BCE that talk about Yahweh and Asherah. And, you know, there were other various divine beings within his kind of pantheon. And gradually over time, these other deities and divine beings were slowly, slowly relegated. Yahweh gradually took on more and more of their roles. So, yeah, we're not talking about a monotheistic construct of God when we're talking about his early career. We're talking very much about a deity who is really networked into this polytheistic context. Well, let's delve into that all a bit more now, and especially in a focus of your book on God's body and these various aspects of his body in particular. I mean first questions for me I've got on my list here but well let's go back to the right to the very start to the creation

story in the Old Testament because even right at the beginning of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible do we get references to God having a body? Yeah, and it's interesting, isn't it? Because we always think of like, it's automatic to assume that the book of Genesis and the creation story in Genesis is like the beginning, because it comes at the beginning of the Bible, and it's about the beginnings of the world. But that's kind of relatively one of the later texts in the Hebrew Bible. When it was written, it was written about probably 5th century BCE. But yeah, even in that text, you know, we get two different versions of creation. You have a story in the first chapter of Genesis where God makes everything in six days

and has the seventh day off for a rest. And then another version, which is the story about Adam and Eve. But in both of those versions, you get very much the sense that God has a body. In the Adam and Eve story, obviously, this is a God who shapes Adam from clay with his hands and fingers, and who breathes, you know, blows into Adam's mouth and nose the breath of life. But in the first story, the whole idea about creating humans, God says to the other members of his divine council, there's a lot of plural language that's used. He says, let us make man or human in our image, according to our likeness. And that theologically. He says, let us make man or human in our image according to our likeness. And that theologically, you know, pious priests and rabbis have said, oh, this is about spiritual likeness or a kind of a moral likeness that humans share with God. But in its original context, that wasn't

the case at all. This is about a visual correspondence between the bodies of the gods and human bodies that we share a visual likeness to these ancient deities. This isn't just a one-off in Genesis either, isn't it, Francesca? I know it's very difficult to do a narrative. As you say, these various versions, they come from different times in ancient history. Some are earlier, some are later. But in Genesis, you've got other versions of God with a body. We'll get to the footsteps in a bit. I think walking with Abraham and then Exodus as well. You've got Moses and the like and seeing God with a body too so although it's right at the start this is just the beginning there are so many more examples that we see as we go through the

Old Testament especially like at the start definitely and I think you know importantly as well it's not just in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament you know you get similar kinds of assumptions about the body of God in New Testament texts as well. And I'm not talking about Jesus here. I'm talking about, you know, God the Father within that kind of doctrinal sense. But you get various just assumptions in descriptions like in the book of Revelation about God sitting on the throne in the heavens at his right hand stands this Christ figure and, you know, you get references to God's body parts in the New Testament as well so it's not just kind of an unsophisticated or it's not a primitive aspect of early religious belief within this particular context it was just a part of the cultural and religious DNA of these societies that they simply assumed that God had a body it's just that in a lot of

these texts God's body was deliberately hidden and he only revealed himself to special people like Moses, like Abraham. Right, because actually keeping on that Moses link there, just one more thing before we delve into various body parts, as it may be, is the story, of course, of the Ten Commandments and the biblical ban on divine images. Now, what is this story and how has it sometimes been used by people to say that God didn't have a body but how can we refute that statement in itself? I mean one way to refute it is by pointing to all the biblical references to God's body and God's body parts. Exactly yes. The second reason is that the

Ten Commandments are really interesting. There are two versions. There's one in the Book of Exodus and one in the Book of Deuteronomy. There are some slight variations between those two versions. But, you know, these are widely understood to kind of, to be an important, a relatively early tradition. But one of the key points about the Ten Commandments is this prohibition on the use of images. You know, you shall not make an image of anything in the likeness of heaven above or the earth or the underworld. But you know, as a lot of scholars point out, there'd be no need for a ban on images of gods, if it weren't for the fact that people were creating images of their gods. So for a start, you know, that does suggest that people were using cult images of their deities. But also the Ten Commandments, there's a lot of

kind of evidence of redactional editorial activity, you know, these texts have been messed around with. And so it looks like that particular prohibition in the Ten Commandments about bans the use of divine images is a later insertion into the Ten Commandments. So yeah, you need to do some kind of like careful textual exegesis when you're looking at these texts. But most scholars would agree that there's this very kind of anthropomorphic understanding of God throughout these texts. Well, then let's really delve into this anthropomorphic idea of God now. And first of all, the feet. Let's talk about feet, because God God's footprints you can see them all over the

bible can't you yeah I mean not just in terms of descriptions of him walking around and trampling enemies and kind of shattering mountains in the ancient world one of the key kind of understandings of the relationship between humans and gods was the idea that this was a social relationship and how do you have a social relationship with an imaginary being? I mean, you know, for the sake of argument, let's just say gods are imaginary beings. How do you have a social relationship with an imaginary being? Well, you know, you give them the kinds of bodies and characteristics and tendencies that we have as humans. That's what kind of binds us together and so one of the kind

of key collection of motifs if you like in a lot of biblical texts is Yahweh's insistence that the Jerusalem temple is the place for the soles of his feet and he says this is the place where I will plant my feet I will place my feet forever and it's about not just his permanence in the Jerusalem temple but it's about his actual bodily presence it's about not just his permanence in the Jerusalem temple, but it's about his actual bodily presence. It's about his social being. Temples weren't just symbolic buildings. You know how a church is a little bit like a symbolic building today. It's where you conduct rituals, but no one thinks that God is physically present in the church, you know, apart from the whole bread and wine thing. Temples in the ancient world were understood to be the dwelling places of God.

This is where the gods actually were. The be the dwelling places of gods. This is where the gods actually were. The word for a temple is house. This was a house, literally, where the god dwelt. And priests and other ritual officials were basically their servants. So to worship the gods is exactly the same as to serve the gods in that sense, like, you know, being body attendants. This doesn't seem unique to, to the hebrew god at all you can see this in various other cultures and religions this importance of footsteps and saying this is where the god resides so one of the incredible temples that i talk about in the book is this remarkable iron age site at indara in syria which is you know is probably the closest

in terms of its architectural blueprint is the closest that we can get to imagining what the Jerusalem temple would have been like in the Iron Age. So in other words, the temple supposedly built by King Solomon. But in this temple in Aindara, you can see these huge footprints, divine footprints carved into the threshold of the temple. Each footprint is about a metre long and you can see the feet neatly paired on the threshold of the temple at the entrance. And then the stride of one footprint, because there's a left footprint in the middle of the temple as the deity walks into the building, and then the right footprint is right at the very back of the temple in the Holy of Holies, so the most sacred inner sanctum of the deity. And it's about trying to materialise and monumentalise the notion that

in this temple, that particular deity was present. They strode into this temple and took up residence in there. Temple itself was destroyed in ancient times, but then the remnants of it where you could see these footprints, they were bombed in 2018 in a Turkish airstrike which was devastating so not much of that temple remains now I was lucky enough to visit it before it was bombed but it was incredible just to put my own feet in the footprints of this deity it was amazing it's all so interesting in regards to the footprints and how important symbolically important is and actually say being there how much it can resonate even today I mean but Francesca this idea of the God taking up residence like Yahweh in Jerusalem how can that work alongside you mentioned it briefly at the start of this section about you

know this God being a very mobile God being a very active God so how does this all correlate yeah I mean well gods were as mobile as human beings as their worshippers. So the mobility of a god was important in the sense that if, say, for example, invaders came and, you know, destroyed your temple as invaders tend to do. So the Assyrians did it to the Temple of Yahweh in Samaria, and the Babylonians did it to the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem. How do you correlate that theologically? Does this mean that your God is so weak that he has been defeated by foreign agents and their own gods? Or do you say, no, this is because God has deliberately abandoned his temple? He has, you know, literally left the temple and that's what's enabled it to fall. So the idea that gods

were mobile and they could withdraw from the earthly realm, they could withdraw from their worshippers, was a really common sort of theological and cultural motif across ancient Southwest Asia. You find the same thing in a lot of Mesopotamian texts as well. But it also meant that God could go for walks. So we've got biblical stories about God walking through, he has evening strolls in the Garden of Eden. We have stories about him, you know, walking along the roads and with Abraham when he's trying to decide whether he wants to destroy Sodom or not. So yeah, he's a God who walks past Moses on the top of Mount Sinai. He hides Moses in the cleft of a rock because Moses says, I want to see you. And Yahweh's like, okay, but it's very dangerous to look at me in the face. So,

you know, I'll let you see me, but you have to hide in this cleft of a rock. And then you have this description of God passing by. And as he passes passes by he covers the cleft of the rock in which Moses is hiding with the palm of his hand so that anything that Moses can see as he strides by is God's backside that's what he says he says he sees his back end it's the same word that's used to talk about the backside of an animal when its dung is cleared away before it goes into the temple for sacrifice so yeah Moses sees God's bum. I've got on my notes the thing of Moses and his companions seeing God's feet as well it seems like these are these various aspects of witnessing God but not is he quite coy is coy the right word there it's a focus on different aspects of his body. Yeah I mean I think there's a theological coyness a hidden body is coy the right word there it's a focus on different aspects of his body yeah i mean i

think there's a theological coyness a hidden body is not the same as a non-existent body and so the sense very much is that it was such an extraordinary you know mythologically but also ritually because don't forget the gods were manifest in cult statues in the temples these were very high status exclusive kinds of encounters with the deity. So mythologically, the idea that God would only sort of reveal himself in full to certain special humans. So when Moses and the other tribal leaders of Israel go up Mount Sinai the first time to kind of cut the deal with Yahweh that he is going to be their God and they will be his people. We're told in the text in Exodus that they saw God's feet resting, basically resting on his sky

pavement. It's like a kind of, you know, lapis blue kind of colour. And then we're told, oh, and they saw the God of Israel and they sat down and had a meal with him. So the biblical writers are quite, it's almost like using like a kind of a modesty device to kind of screen the deity from direct view because this was an incredibly powerful deity you know this was a god who ordinary worshippers weren't able to see and so the biblical writers are kind of reflecting that in some ways there's so many questions i could ask about that you mentioned food and eating and all of that so we'll get to that in a second i mean i'd like to stay a bit more on feats for a bit longer because you mentioned how sometimes you see Yahweh is mentioned that he's walking

with certain peoples but in what other contexts, sometimes more ruthless contexts, does he sometimes use his feet? There's a perfect example of the gruesome use of God's feet in the book of Isaiah in which you kind of get this vision of a sentry looking out from the walls of Jerusalem at the landscape. And he sees this really glamorous, blood spattered figure striding back towards the city. And it's Yahweh. And the sentry says, Oh, what have you been doing? And Yahweh says, I've been treading the wine press. You know, I was like treading the wine press and all the juice of the grapes spattered on my clothes. And then Yahweh then reveals, when he says he's been treading

the wine press, what he actually means is that he's been out in battle in Edom, which is an enemy nation in what's now southern Jordan. And he's been trampling bodies, human bodies, you know, because it was very, very common ancient southwest asian cultures to believe that your deities were on the battlefield along with you and so this you know it was a deity who was also a warrior god and so him striding back to his hometown covered in blood looking very glamorous there's this real kind of in the text as you read it you get this real sense that this is a kind of almost like a very sexual alpha masculine allure to this kind of blood-stained divine warrior as he comes back so yeah this is a god who's been knee-deep knee-deep in bodies but you mentioned wine there as well which is quite

interesting because when talking about his feet in the bible and you've hinted at it already how you do have this one side this more grues gruesome side, this more, I guess, warrior, more virile side, perhaps to say that way. But on the other side, you do have him walking through the Garden of Eden, or as you mentioned, walking in these more serene, peaceful settings too. Yeah. And I mean, it's again, very much in keeping with other mythological traditions more widely across ancient Southwest Asia. There's an idea that gods had their own social lives apart from the social lives that they had with their worshippers so within a polytheistic context in particular you often find like stories of gods going for walks along the seashore in the hope

of encountering some young goddess to have sex with so yeah there are all sorts of reasons why gods would have their own kind of inner personal life as well and one of the things that you know Yahweh likes doing in the according to the bible is obviously having these kind of daily strolls through the garden of Eden and he also likes making lists and writing books and we find him singing and humming and whistling and laughing so yeah this is a god who's quite a rounded character in some ways in the bible and keeping on that you mentioned the two words there so i've got to ask about it did these early worshippers of yahweh did they believe that god had a sex life

i think they probably did they certainly understood that he had a consort the high goddess asherah she was known as Atherat in other societies, but Asherah is her Hebrew name. And, you know, even the biblical writers, they're kind of looking back and writing at a point by which Asherah worship had fallen by the wayside for various complex reasons. So they, you know, are always telling off their readers, you know, you shall not have, you know, this cult object of Asherah next to the altar of Yahweh. You know, they talk about statues of Asherah in the Jerusalem temple alongside, you know, in Yahweh's own place. So we know that he had a consort, but there are allusions and indications that, you know, he was capable of sexual relationships. There's some very disturbing material in the book of Ezekiel in which Yahweh's

worshippers whom he's punished by bringing in various foreign nations against them, they're kind of cast in the role of his wife, God's wife. And the story of their relationship is told that, you know, so Israel is personified as a young girl whom Yahweh first encounters when she's a baby. He then waits for her to reach puberty and then starts a sexual relationship with her. She's unfaithful to him when she's his wife by, you know, having relationships with other gods and forging alliances with other nations. And then God, as a result, you know, he has been cook-holded. He brings in these foreign lovers to punish her now this is all an elaborate allegory in the book of Ezekiel but it reflects nonetheless the idea that this was

an anthropomorphic god who you know he was a divine husband and was easily imagined as being a sexually active deity and I guess obvious to say, but I know you mentioned it, therefore, in the book as well, as we work our way up from feet, an anthropomorphic figure who also had genitalia, had a penis. I mean, a lot of gods. In some ways, you know, a lot of very masculine, virile gods are often just assumed to be, oh, they were the warriors of the ancient world in the heavenly realm. And whereas goddesses were the fertility deities but that's not the case at all fertility was understood to be a masculine attribute primarily you know this these are the gods that were responsible for gifting or blessing the earthly realm with fertility whether it was

agricultural or animal or human fertility and so you, if you're any kind of fertility god worth their salt would have a decent penis, a good sized penis and, you know, and testicles filled with fertile semen. And so you kind of get hints of that in the biblical text too. So we get a glimpse, a literary glimpse, if you like, of Yahweh's genitalia in the book of Ezekiel, where Ezekiel, who's both a priest and a prophet, you know, sees Yahweh enthroned on his throne from the Jerusalem temple. And he basically describes what he sees. And, you know, he says that this is one like a human being, one shaped like a human being sitting on this throne. This is God. But the top half of God's body is covered with kind of bright fire and light. The bottom half of his body is

similarly covered. But what Ezekiel can see is his motnaim, a Hebrew word, which is normally very politely translated as loins, but actually means genitals. So Ezekiel sort of exposes, if you like, God's genitals in this incredible vision in the first chapter of his book. You look really shocked and stunned no i know no trust me my friend no we've done sex and ancient roman stuff before so i've heard many many of these stories but actually one of my friends did say after i finished recording that podcast when he listened to it how uncomfortable it sounded as if i was maybe that's just the how i grew up but i'm now used to it so it's okay and i think it was important to cover that because it's such an interesting part of the story of God's body of your book of what's these early worshippers

of Yahweh believed because it does see doesn't it as we're working our way up and you mentioned it earlier and we've mentioned the words virile and so on this was a God who at some stages you know he was active he was walking around he was this portrayal of a warrior who was active, I guess, maybe even in the prime of life, and was fertile to this important part of ancient Near Eastern deities. Absolutely. But you know, it's, that's what I mean when I say that this was a god who was very much a part of his broader cultural context. So things like, it might sound weird to say that this was a god who was understood to, you know, to have sexuality and to be sexual, because we're so accustomed, thanks to Judaism and Christianity, which are both

pretty much post-biblical religions, if you like, as we understand them today. Judaism and Christianity are post-biblical religions in that sense. But these particular theologies within those religions have a very kind of different view of both the notion of a divine body, but also the notion of sexuality. Christianity in particular, early Christianity had a lot of hang ups about sex, a huge amount of hang ups about sex. And so within the early centuries of Christianity, as these biblical texts were being used both as proof texts, but also as scripture, this was instructional material. There was an increasing desire to separate the holy from the horny, I suppose. The holy from the horny. There we go. You've heard it here. The holy from the horny. There we go. You've heard it here.

Sex became in that very, you know, Augustine is one of the early church fathers who's not the only one to blame, but is very much very influential. He describes sex as sin was a congenital, congenitally transmitted disease. It was by means of sex through Adam Seaman, he said, that the rest of humanity was corrupted. So sex became this very sort of dangerous human aspect of what it is to be in the world, and was very much separated from divine, what it is to be divine. And so, you know, we get these very sort of sanitized reinterpretations of older biblical material and they get, you know, sort of retrojected back into the past. But ancient worshippers were much more comfortable with the idea of sexy gods and goddesses. I think absolutely. And I think that's important to stress. We won't hang on this too long because otherwise it will become a Betwixt the Sheets podcast. But when you go to somewhere like Egypt and you look at the pharaonic depictions on the walls of the temples

and you see versions of Amun, like with erect penises, because they were gods of fertility, and this was just part of how they envisaged it. So when you see that, and you can kind of apply that, I guess, to the early worshippers of Yahweh in that part of the world too, in a similar kind of mindset. So it's really interesting to delve into that and to hear about that here and now.

I mean, it is interesting and that this kind of virile young man portrayal that you have I mean one key story that I'd like to ask about here because I thought this was really interesting is if we go back to Genesis is there this story of God wrestling of God wrestling with a figure there's a story in Genesis in whichob encounters this incredibly strong man so it would seem and wrestles with him all night you know a very much a physical fight and it's not until just before daybreak this divine being jacob realizes that he's wrestling with the god and not just simply some kind of frighteningly bush buff man so as daybreak is about to break so jacob, you know, the God says to Jacob, let me go and I will give you a blessing. And he gives him this blessing.

It's revealed that this is none other than God himself. And it may be that that's a tradition that's actually a reworking of older myths and legends about, you know, it's set at a river, which are always liminal, dangerous places in these sorts of mythologies so it may be that this was originally a tradition related to a different kind of deity who was within the Yahwistic preferences if you like theologically of the biblical writers these important well-known folk stories and traditions have been kind of set within a larger narrative in which there is only one god and so therefore this is the God that Jacob wrestled with is none other than Yahweh himself. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships.

Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects. We manage to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain. Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time. Can only have been eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably the most famous person in the West. And look backwards

to understand technologies that are still in progress. You know, when people turn around to me and say, oh, why would you want to live forever? Life's rubbish. I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. How can we therefore try and get a picture from this text, from also looking at these other early cultures and bring it into the idea of Yahweh, the portrayal of Yahweh, of, let's say, God's upper body, his arms, his hands and the like. Do we get any idea about these parts of his body, therefore, from the Bible? Yeah, I mean, with loads of references to his arms and hands. I mean, in fact, his arms and hands are one of the most kind of repeated body parts that we find in biblical traditions, mainly because they're used so often both to talk about

the ways in which he liberates and helps his people. So for example, in the very famous story of the escape from Egypt, so the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt. And the story that we're used to seeing like in films and on the telly and stuff is the idea that Moses stands at the edge of the so-called Red Sea. It's not Red Sea in the Bible, it's the Sea of Reeds. Red Sea is kind of a later misunderstanding of the name. So you see Moses standing there, don't you, like with his arms raised up and then, you know, the waters of the sea miraculously pass and then the Israelites walk through. In the oldest version of that story in the Bible, it's in a poem in Exodus 15, and it's with his arms and hands and with his breath, the snort from his nostrils, we're told, that Yahweh parts the sea. It's the sense in which the iconography

of ancient deities, but particularly warrior deities, informed these sorts of traditions. One of the most common sorts of cult statues of deities is the cult statue of a warrior god, so in typical warrior pose and they're always shown with their usually their right arm raised up above their heads brandishing some kind of a weapon and so this is the outstretched arm of god as it's called in the bible that basically liberates the israelites from pharaoh this is the outstretched arm of god that hundreds of years later you know according to a biblical chronology but hundreds of years later in the 6th century BCE, when God's people have been exiled to Babylonia, in the book of Isaiah, they cry out, they petition Yahweh's arm and they say, wake up to his arm,

wake up arm, wake up and come back and liberate us again. So they thought his arm was merely sleeping or at some points in that text, Yahwehweh said do you think that my arm is too short to reach into Babylonia and rescue you of course it's not it's not that I am weak or somehow you know disabled by the Babylonians you know I'm not asleep I have deliberately chosen to abandon you to this fate so all of that language of the arms and hands is very much draws on common iconography and the art of the divine across ancient Southwest Asia. And this idea that he could, if he wanted to, he could brandish a weapon with that arm like other gods from that part of ancient history. collection of texts in Isaiah, when Yahweh does decide that he is going to step in and liberate his people, this time from captivity in Babylon, he basically tools up. You know, he says he's going to put on his helmet and he's going to like grab his weapons. And so this used to be dismissed

by theologians as merely as picture language. This is simple picture language for simple people so that when they read these texts, they can begin to get a sense of the power of this God. But this is all symbolic. This is all metaphor. It's all poetry. It's not that at all. This was the way in which people understood their deity. And, you know, and the idea of God having a body, even when within early Judaism and Christianity, even when those ideas had been overturned in favour of broadly platonic philosophical constructs of the divine, which have to be immaterial, incorporeal, indivisible, all the other ends, they still couldn't let go of this body language of God. I mean, even now, people still talk about, you know, believers, you know, will still use body language to say that God hears, God sees, God speaks to them. So that body language is still

so deeply rooted in a lot of these religious traditions that you can't just get rid of it. It's mad just to hear that, just to apply, let's say, something like a helmet with God, something like that from hundreds of years ago. But I'd like to ask about a few other parts of the body first of all. I mean, you did mention there the helmet, the head. Now, I think the popular perception now might be from popular culture. I know I do. If you think of God, you sometimes think of an old bearded man, white hair flowing or something like that. Perceptions differ. Do we have any idea what these ancient worshippers of Yahweh believed that God looks like what his face looks like so sort of taking in sort of ancient visual culture so iconography

and various archaeological artifacts alongside biblical references it looks like probably in his kind of as I said early career so say the Iron Age, he was probably understood to have this kind of bluey black hair, a beautiful groomed beard, and this kind of reddish tint to his skin. This was very common, like deities almost gave off this ready-breck glow. Am I showing my age if I say ready-breck glow? I think I probably am. But they had this kind of this aura, this kind of light that came out of them. And red was very much the colour of virility. There's a description in the Song of Songs, which is beautiful poetry in the Hebrew Bible of most beautiful man. And when we read this

description, it's actually a description of a statue in a temple. So if we were to look at that description, we would get the sense that this is probably what Yahweh was understood to look like. And it describes this, you know, this good looking muscle bound deity who's kind of got this kind of black hair, and that sweet oiled beard, and it's perfumed and this kind of red, ruddy skin. So this is probably how God was originally understood to be. But he, you know, gradually at the latest, by the second century BCE, when the book of Daniel was written, God was understood to look quite different. He looked more like an aged scribe, like a Torah scribe. He had white hair and a white beard. Now, it begs the question, therefore, do we know why, any idea why this great change happens? It's quite complicated. It's partly recycling ideas

about the god Eil. So as I said, originally, Yahweh was one of a number of deities, and he wasn't at the top of his local pantheon. The top of the local pantheon was the high god Eil. But you know, we know from various other texts from the ancient Levant that he was understood to have a long grey or white beard that sat on his chest. And that whiteness wasn't a sign of degeneration. It was a sign of kind of seniority and wisdom because he was the oldest god in the cosmos. He's the top of the, I mean, the name Eil basically means deity. So scholars think that Yahweh was originally understood to be one of the sons of Eil. But gradually, as he kind of climbed to the top of his local pantheons, so he acquired various roles and titles and functions, and the looks of the highest god, Eil himself. So that's one reason why it looks like he starts to increasingly be

understood to have become, to have gone grey, basically, to have had this white hair. But it's also because bodies of the gods generally in this part of the world were becoming increasingly transcendent and within Yahweh worship in particular that transcendence was often very closely linked to celestial brightness so the white brightness of the stars so increasingly kind of God's red, ready-bred glow. I'm starting to regret using this metaphor, but his ready-bred glow gradually became kind of brighter and lighter. And so that kind of impacted the way in which he was understood to look. It's something that's reflected, you know, in those stories in the Gospels and in Book of Revelation. So when the disciples go to

the empty tomb and they see there's nothing there, there's no corpse there, but there are these like angels or divine messengers dressed in bright white. It's that same sense. They're dressed in bright white because that was understood to be the wardrobe of the heavenly realm. And I guess from going on from that, it's quite interesting how that image therefore disappears over time. time how does that image can we say change to this idea of God becoming completely intangible and to then almost taking this next step where he's gone from ready break glow to much older to not actually having a tangible body how does this all therefore come about it's interesting because it never quite disappears I mean that's why we've got our ideas of like an old white head guy, you know, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So that notion never quite disappears. And equally, you know, this move, this shift in the very late centuries, so I say from about the second century BCE onwards, that shift towards a more incorporeal idea of God. that shift towards a more incorporeal idea of God. Basically, that wasn't a mainstream view,

that takes a long time for that to become mainstream. So we see it reflected in the works of certain early Jewish writers and thinkers. But you know, even into the rabbinic era, so we're talking about a form of Judaism from about the first century of the common era to the sixth century, they were still talking about God in very corporeal terms. They talk about God when the Jerusalem temple's destroyed, wandering around the ruins of his temple, weeping and kissing the broken walls. They talk about God putting on a prayer shawl and binding tefillin, you know, these little scrolls that are bound onto the head and onto the forearm of worshippers. You know, the rabbis talk about God doing that himself, putting on tefillin and prayer shawls. So they still had this very corporeal, anthropomorphic sense of God. So that's a very big preface as a way of saying, yes,

gradually we get to a more transcendent, immaterial, incorporeal view of God. But that was a relatively specialist theological position that only gradually gradually crept into early Judaism and Christianity but why do we get it one reason is the idea that God's body was hidden and once you kind of get the idea of a hidden body you start to get the idea that nobody had ever seen it and once you start to get that you get the idea that nobody has seen it because it was impossible to see and therefore after that there was no body at all. But primarily, it's the impact of the loss of traditional forms of Yahweh worship. So things like the destruction of the temple in the 6th century BCE, it was rebuilt, but then destroyed again by the Romans in 70 CE. But the loss of cult statues, which probably happened at the end of the

Iron Age, sort of the Torah scrolls, or what we would identify now as the Torah scrolls, gradually took the place in ritual of the cult statue. Something that's kind of, you can see echoes of in modern synagogue practice today, when the statue was taken out of its special sacred cupboard and undressed and paraded around and unrolled and it's not touched by human hands, you know, all of that kind of stuff so the loss of cult statues i think was one reason cult statues were understood to render any deity vulnerable to looting displacement disfigurement disabling so better to get rid of cult statues theologically and say we don't need them than to risk your god being godpped. But also it was the kind of the influx, I think, of certain

forms of Hellenistic metaphysics, basically. So certain philosophical platonic ideas that insisted that the divine, to be truly divine, had to be completely other to anything in the cosmos. So it had to be completely immaterial, completely incorporeal, completely unchangeable, indivisible, you know, whereas the world and a body can be divided up into parts, is changeable, is mutable. The idea that the divine, according to certain primarily neoplatonic other forms of philosophy too, but the idea that the divine could be like anything in the universe meant that the divine could not be divine at all. And so therefore God could not have a body

because God could not be corporeal or material or divisible or changeable as bodies are. And such a belief would have been, from what you've been saying, I love the idea that there may well have originally been cult statues of Yahweh that don't survive. But this whole idea of this intangible God would have been completely alien to the ancient worshippers of Yahweh. It's absolutely fascinating when you think that, how different they thought they, well, what image they had of Yahweh of God compared to later images of him it's

fascinating when you really delve into how it changes over time yeah I mean we get you know there's some amazing texts like even someone like Origen really famous early church father he's spitting feathers about the fact that some Christians still think that God has a body he says whose head stretches up to the heavens and his feet rest like a footstool on the earth. Loads of early Christian theologians are having a go at other Christian leaders and theologians who think it's perfectly fine to think of God as having a body. So this was a very, very slow adjustment. I mean, it's only really with Maimonides within Judaism. it's only really with Maimonides within Judaism and so we're talking about 12th century of the common era that you get this kind of within mainstream Jewish tradition you get a complete

rejection of the idea of God having a body because certain forms of mystical Judaism like medieval mystical Judaism so kind of forms of what we might think of as early Kabbalah for example still very much talked about the idea of God's body. There's an incredible text called the Shia Kama that talks about the measurements of God's body and says that, you know, it's ginormous, it's huge. But you know, it's got interesting details, like the length of God's little finger is the same as the length of his nose and that kind of thing. So it was a very, very slow and gradual process. Within Christianity, I think the rejection of God's body came a lot more quickly, primarily because of debates about the nature of Christ and Christ's body.

So for Christianity, it was Jesus as the incarnation, literally incarnation means literally in the flesh. So it was like, you know, Jesus as God incarnate, God in the flesh, was so important to Christianity, to early Christianity, that that became the only way in which God could have had a body. It gave Christianity, if you like, an exclusive claim to the only kind of version of divine embodiment, which was so important to its theology and its ideology. Even though, is it right to say that in the Bible, it is never categorically said that God didn't have a body? No, there are two places. In the Hebrew Bible, it's never said that God didn't have a body. There are only two places in the New Testament where you get the idea that God is body-less. Sometimes you get people like Jesus saying God is spirit, which is often understood to mean that he is immaterial.

Within its first century, early second century context, this spirit was understood to be a material substance. You know, we think of it as being this kind of nothingness, but it was understood to be this kind of very refined, quite hot cosmic material. You get various New Testament characters, including Jesus, saying things like, no one has ever seen God. We think, whereas if you look in the Torah, you know, Jesus was meant to be a good Torah scholar in the sense that he's shown reading Torah in synagogues and stuff. But you know, we're told that Moses went up Mount Sinai and not only saw God, but used to have face-to-face conversation with him. You know, the text Yahweh says at one point, you know, I speak to Moses face-to-face or mouth-to-mouth as one would speak to a friend. So his body is never denied in that way.

There's no sense in which somehow you have to deny the existence of God's body within these biblical texts. Francesca, this has all been so interesting. We've got to start wrapping up now. I mean, I want to leave it, though, on you do something at the end of your book in the epilogue, which I think is very good. You almost like a dissection is the wrong word, but if you had God's body on the table for these early worshippers, what key features do we think we would see of what these early worshippers of Yahweh thought were the qualities of the God himself? I think, yeah, at the end of the book, I do an autopsy of the ancient God of the Bible. Actually, I compare his body to Christ's corpse, which makes it sound like quite a weird way to end a book, but I kind of think it works. But yeah, if we were to have, you know,

the ancient God Yahweh, if we were to have his body laid out on a slab, we would see basically a body that is supersized. He was generally understood, you know, even though he was human shaped, he was generally in most traditions, not all of them, but in most traditions understood to be quite supersized, so bigger than human scale, with red ruddy skin, this kind of beautifully groomed black hair, a long black beard that would gradually turn white and grey over time. He would be very muscular, he'd have ink stains on his fingers from writing the Torah, as we're told in various traditions. He would have lots of eyeliner on his eyes. Ancient deities, like a lot of high status ancient humans,

wore eyeliner. It was very culturally very important and ritually too. Pierced ears. This was a god who was above all good looking. I mean, he was, you know, really good looking deity before he turned old and grey and before his body disappeared. Well, let's leave it there then. We've only really scratched the surface of this because there is so much more to the story in your book, Francesca. This has been a great chat. And last,

but certainly not least, your book on this whole topic is called? God and Anatomy. Brilliant. Well, it just goes for me to say, Francesca, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. Francesca, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me. Well, there you go.

There was Dr. Francesca Stavrocapullo explaining all about the body of God and her new book. I hope you enjoyed it. It is quite a big topic. And it was a little daunting for me as an interviewer because, as mentioned, it is such a huge topic. But I really do hope you enjoyed the episode. Francesca is an absolute delight to chat to now last but certainly not least as mentioned at the end of my previous episode of our previous ancients episode i will be at chalk valley next week got a talk we've got a couple of reenactments from ancient history and we've got a couple of live interviews one on neanderthals with rebecca ragsykes and another one on 100 objects from

ancient egypt with with Toby Wilkinson I can't wait for both of those, I love Ancient Egypt and I'm really starting to fall in love with the early evolution of homonyms, with early homo sapiens, denisovans Neanderthals and so much more so I really can't wait for both of those and hopefully

I might see some of you there last but certainly not least, if you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on either Spotify Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from, the whole team and myself especially would really, really appreciate it. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.