Yahweh has a body, but he's still not Baal

 This is an expanded review of Francesca Stavrakopoulou's "God: An Anatomy."

God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a great book in many ways, but a nagging issue, an overemphasis on one talking point, and what I believe is an incorrect interpretation of the Book of Job in the last chapter ultimately cost it a star. I’d rate this 3 1/2 if you let me be precise. (Since we can't do half stars, and the average rating is even higher on Yellow Satan than here, it got 3 stars there, and I reserve the right to downgrade the 4-star here.)

With that, let’s dig in, including the expanded parts.

It’s easy to forget that the God of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)/Christian Old Testament — who continues as God the Father for Trinitarian Christians in the New Testament — has a literal corporeal body. Fundamentalist versions of both Judaism and Christianity of course bury this deeply.

So, too, does “traditional” critical theology. Its Enlightenment basis is as willing to explain away this fact with words such as “allegory” and “anthropomorphizing.”

Wrong move, says Fransesca Stavrakopoulou in “God: An Anatomy.”

Yahweh (she seems to hint at, but doesn’t openly embrace, some version of the Midianite hypothesis) is just as embodied as Baal or Marduk. More importantly, he’s just as masculinely male, complete with penis. As part of this, she notes that “hand” as well as “foot” is often a biblical synonym for “penis,” as in other southwest Arabian religious works. And Yahweh waves his penis. He wields it. He is procreative with it.

And — like Egypt’s Amen but unlike his Mesopotamian god counterparts — sometimes, Yahweh is a solo procreator. No Asherah or other female involved. Besides the Genesis 2-3 creation myth, Stavrakopoulou cites the story of Jeshurun from Deuteronomy, as well as passages from Job and Jeremiah. With Jeshurun being Israel, of course, Yahweh wasn’t literally seen as fathering each individual member of the nation. (OTOH, Dt. 32 reads more like an adoption and nurturing story than a birth story. Sidebar: Reading it with fresh eyes, it’s clearly a story written eons after Israel’s purported escape from Egypt.)

The nagging issue? Probably at least 80 percent of endnotes refer to Bible passages. FOOTnotes — using that word correctly — would have been MUCH more convenient. (In-line citations, common at least in US biblical criticism writings, would have been better yet.) In a certain number of cases, I was familiar with the verse, even in Stavrakopoulou’s translation. But, I couldn’t remember the exact Bible passage. Seriously, this came close to losing the book a star by itself.

And, occasionally, I didn’t totally trust her translation. And, that ties with her perhaps overemphasizing not just feet, but entire legs, as euphemisms for genitals. Specifically, it was Song of Songs 5:10-16 that was a bridge too far for me. My modern translation has verse 15 as “His legs are alabaster pillars,” after verse 14 talks of the lover’s arms. She translates that as “genitals.” (That said, there are far more off the wall takes: https://explorethefaith.com/song-of-s.... That’s not only off the wall, but obviously incorrect, and I’m not prudish, nor de-bodifying.) But at other times, Stavrakopoulou is willing to occasionally going beyond "literal" to "literalistic."

The bigger issue, that I'll hit now, and that relates to the header and to the paragraph immediately above of the original review?

Yahweh is not Baal. Yes, there are parallels. Yes, he was perceived as having a physical body, including genitals. Yes, he was perceived outside the "authoritative" Tanakh as having Asherah as a consort.

But? While he was described as letting Israel a woman be violated, he's not really described as having a metaphorical sexual relationship with her. (I take Song of Songs face value as a human love song. Period.) Nor, on the bits of ostraca etc. that we have talking about him and Asherah, is he described as having a sexual relationship with her. To put it in crude-ish modern terms? Yahweh may have a big swinging dick in terms of toxic masculinity, but he's not portrayed as having a big swinging dick in terms of consorting with Asherah as a consort, let alone chasing other goddesses.

From what I understand of pre-Islamic North Arab deities (and Midian was Northwest Arabia, and without necessarily buying the "Kenite" part, on etymology, I accept a Midianite origin of Yahweh), we shouldn't see them as being exactly the same as the Fertile Crescent northern Semitic pantheon. The Norse and Celtic pantheons, for example, don't fully map onto the Greco-Roman gods, and in fact the Roman gods and demigods don't fully map onto Greeks ones.

Then, I just don’t agree with her on the “framing” of Job.

Stavrakopoulou claims that Job knows Yahweh is assaulting him. Actually, let's not call the verbal an assault, but just an interrogation.

And, taking the pre-Gettier standard philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Job actually knows bupkis about the physical assault — his loss of family, wealth, etc. Therefore, he does not know he is under assault from the eye of god. (Gettier's hole-poking still has not resulted in a truly better definition.)

Plus, if we are indeed taking Job literally, of course, Yahweh and the Satan have a bet. This isn't even sloughing off evil onto the Satan, contra Stavra, as Yahweh puts limits on what he can do. And, again, as we have it today, it's a bet, not Satan punishing evil.

Interestingly, we're never told the amount of the wager. Is it for the Satan to get a day on the throne of Yahweh, a day with his feet on Yahweh's footstool?

It must also be remembered that the Angel of Yahweh is called a Satan in confronting Balaam in Numbers.

All points to remember. (There is a “Babylonian Job” story from way back, but it doesn’t have the equivalent of a Satan in it at all; no other SW Asian myth parallels Job.) And, Job is too early, likely started, at least, in the 6th century BCE, to have been highly influenced by Zoroastrianism to lead to Satan as a dualist figure. After all, the prose opening talks of him coming before Yahweh along with “the sons of God.” Therefore, the Satan as a figure for "sloughing off" of evil from a non-Calvinist, or non-Second Isaiah Yahweh, doesn't totally ring true.

To be honest, I've yet to find ANY good critical interpretation of Job, especially one that seriously wrestles with the prose intro of the Yahweh-Satan wager on its own terms.

(Related thoughts at this blog post on attempted modern existentialist interpretations of Job with presumed but not likely original shorter endings of the book, with this other person's take also failing because they reject the concept of a divine wager.)

So, all in all, speaking as a semi-academic — master’s degree, knowledge of Biblical languages, etc.? I’d rate this 3 3/4 if you let me be precise.



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