The Anthropomorphic God Dethroned

My dear friend and fellow scholar Andrei Orlov has become one of the world's recognized experts on the Pseudepigrapha, especially with the Books of Enoch (Hebrew, Greek, and Old Slavonic) and recently wrote a very informing article "Praxis of the Voice: The Divine Name Traditions in the Apocalypse of Abraham" in the "Journal of Biblical Literature," (JBL 127, no. 1 (2008): 53-70) of which I take just one of his ideas (I shall return for more later), since it has serious implications about the original Jewish understanding of God. Here is an extract from Orlov:

"the seer's vision of the divine throne found in the

Apocalypse of Abraham relies significantly on Ezekiel's account and stands in direct continuity with Merkabah tradition.

^{At the same time, however, scholars observe that the Slavonic pseudepigraphon shows attempts to depart from the overt anthropomorphism of this prophetic book. Christopher Rowland, for example, notes that the shift from anthropomorphism is apparent in the portrayal of the divine throne in ch. 18 of the Apocalypse of Abraham.Notwithstanding the many allusions to Ezekiel 1 in the depiction of the throne room in chs. 18 and 19 of the Apocalypse, Rowland highlights a radical paradigm shift in the text's description of the deity, noting "a deliberate attempt... to exclude all reference to the human figure mentioned in Ezek 1." For Rowland, this shift entails that "there was a definite trend within apocalyptic thought away from the direct description of God." (p. 54)}

^{I think it is fascinating to see that the later we get in the literatures, the *more* they change what the early nature andtype of God was. We definitely know, however, that to the early Jews, God was a person, like they were, only far more exalted. He was not an abstract philosophical principle or something along the lines of the Greek philosophers and gymnosophists. God was very personal, so personal in fact, that he actually made us directly in His own image. The Jews took Genesis 1:26-27 quite frankly, at face value. There is no philosophy there, just description. When you look at a man, or a woman, you look at the image and form of God. And Orlov does not miss this significance either. Observe how he describes a scholarly approach to understanding this:}

"The Hebrew Bible reveals complicated polemics for and against anthropomorphic understandings of God. Scholars argue that the anthropomorphic imagery found in biblical materials was "crystallized" in the Israelite priestly ideology known to us as the Priestly source. Moshe Weinfeld points out that the theology of worship delineated in the Priestly source depicts God in "the most tangible corporeal similitudes."

In the Priestly tradition God is understood to have created humanity in his own image (Gen 1:27) and is thus frequently described as possessing a humanlike form.

Scholars have shown that the anthropomorphism of the Priestly authors appears to be intimately connected with the place of divine habitation—the deity possesses a human form and needs to reside in a house or tabernacle. Weinfeld argues that the anthropomorphic position was not entirely an invention of the Priestly tradition but derived from early preexilic sacral conceptions about divine corporeal manifestations found in Mesopotamian literature. Scholars observe that the Priestly understanding of the corporeal representation of the deity finds its clearest expression in the conception of the "Glory of God". (p.58) 

That glory was described as being of fire, light, as well as the body of the Divine.

 

 

Comments

[WalkerW]

Loyal to the simple meaning of scripture, rabbinic Judaism as recorded in the talmudic-midrashic corpus presented God anthropomorphically, in visual terms. When Adam was created, the angels were unable to distinguish him from his Creator (Genesis Rabbah 8).

Maimonides powerful intellectual stature and influence eventually wiped out all vestiges of the anthromorphic God in accepted dogma...Little wonder then that the historians of Jewish Thought, down to the mid 20th century and beyond, shied away from revealing, no, even recognizing, the plain meaning of rabbinic passages depicting a God of human form...Only in recent decades has the pendulum swung in the other direction. Christianity underwent the struggle of eradicating literal anthropomorphism many centuries before the work of the late 12th-early 13th century Jewish sages. In addition to the passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians had to address clearly anthropomorphic contexts in the Gospels and other early Christian works.

"...the beauty of our Father Jacob was like the beauty of Adam, the beauty of Adam was like the beauty of the Divine Presence!" (Bava Batra 58a; Bava Metzia 84a) Comparing the beauty of Adam to the Divine Presence is an elaboration of the biblical theme that man was created in the image of God. According to the rabbinic tradition, that image was passed on to Adam's descendents in a general sense, while the exact 'spit and image', with identical facial features, was inherited by a select few, the first of whom was Jacob...There was a specific tradition that included Jacob in a list of humans whose countenance preserved the exact features that the Creator gave to Adam, making them as indistinguishable from Him as was Adam in the eyes of the angels.

- Shamma Friedman, "Anthropomorphism and It's Eradication," Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, 2007

[WalkerW]

Just to be clear, those paragraphs didn't follow right after each other. Each one is a different excerpt form the article.

[Kerry Shirts]

Thanks for posting these ideas. I can't help it, I think the study of the Old Testament through Judaic eyes is by far the best way to "get it."