To thine eyes
A study of how the body of God was depicted in ancient times is intriguing from head to toe.
GOD: AN ANATOMY, by Francesca Stavrakopoulou (Picador, $37.99)
Yes, you read the title correctly. This is a study of the shape of God’s body, from the feet up, and it is a gripping read. I imagine that the audio was superb, too, for the book began as a series of lectures on Radio 4 in the UK. I propose it next be a TV documentary, as the coloured illustrations in the paperback I found just a bit small. It also made me yearn to get back to tourism. I want to see the shoes of God, the hands of God, the torso of God preserved in the museums of the ancient Near East and in the museums that pillaged the sites. Sadly, I will be too late to see the footprints left by a giant god in a temple in Aleppo in Syria, because in 2018 it was bombed to smithereens.
In each of the 21 chapters, the author, a theology professor at the University of Exeter, focuses on one part of the body of God as understood in different ways by different ancient religions. Part 1 is about the feet and legs, part 2 has four chapters about the genitals, part 3 on the torso, part 4 on the arms and hands, and part 5 on the head; 21 chapters in all. The academic in me was satisfied by the 160 pages of references and index, though the 425 pages of text never dragged.
To be fair, there should probably be a warning on the cover of the book to readers of the Bible. Although the book draws freely on the latest archaeological finds of many religions of the Ancient
Near East, it keeps returning to the text of the Bible. For every Assyrian or Babylonian example Stavrakopoulou cites, there is always a verse from the Bible or occasionally from the New Testament. She argues that there is plenty about the body of God in that sacred text, too. Which is a little surprising, because as any Jew or Muslim and most Christians will inform you, their religion believes that God is invisible, “without bodily parts or passions”. She uses familiar theories about the evolution of religion (for example, that the Bible’s God had a father, El), to argue that at one time the Hebrew conception of God included a female counterpart. While the male god was a snorting, bleeding, hungry and sexually aroused male, the female god was gentle and motherly and
able to make crops grow.
Stavrakopoulou finds her evidence in the colourful metaphors of the Bible, which she argues were originally descriptions of the visualised God. She sees references to pruning, for example, as a metaphor for male circumcision. Only much later in the story did God shed his body and vanish. But the vanishing act was not totally successful, because fragments here and there enable us to track the original story, which to her seems much more real than the God we are not allowed to visualise. None of this is completely new to scholars of ancient religion, but it will startle some believers.
The book is so delightful that one hesitates to be critical. But Stavrakopoulou frequently seems so determined to find First Testament equivalents of the voracious gods of the ancient world that she embraces some rather forced interpretations. Consider her chapters on the genitals. Aware that the obvious references are not about the Jewish God but his or her rivals, she claims all sorts of metaphors for genitalia and sexual acts, from references to fountains to those of the bride of Christ. I am sure that Jews did clean up their religion at some point, but I think this scholar is a loose biblical interpreter.
Still, I was fascinated to learn that archaeologists of ancient Palestine have found many little pocket idols, especially of the goddess Asherah. It is fairly obvious from the First Testament that the people of ancient Israel were quite attracted to a more visual religion. This book is a marvellous reminder that the history of religions has some interesting byways. But please don’t argue that we need to get back to this kind of religion. Stavrakopoulou claims religions that stopped visualising their gods also lost focus on human bodily experience. Thank you, but I am not attracted to those ancient gods or their human imitators. ▮