The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel
Benjamin D. Sommer
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1107422264
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Benjamin D. Sommer investigates the notion of a deity's body and self in ancient Israel, Canaan, and Mesopotamia. He uncovers a lost ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity according to which an essential difference between gods and humans was that gods had more than one body and fluid, unbounded selves. Though the dominant strains of biblical religion rejected it, a monotheistic version of this theological intuition is found in some biblical texts. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers inherited this ancient way of thinking; ideas such as the sefirot in kabbalah and the trinity in Christianity represent a late version of this theology. This book forces us to rethink the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, as this notion of divine fluidity is found in both polytheistic cultures (Babylonia, Assyria, Canaan) and monotheistic ones (biblical religion, Jewish mysticism, Christianity), whereas it is absent in some polytheistic cultures (classical Greece). The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel has important repercussions not only for biblical scholarship and comparative religion but for Jewish-Christian dialogue.
these apparent contradictions point to what I mean by a fragmented identity. Rather, they reflect the fact that Ishtar has, as Tzvi Abusch puts it, “a coherent and believable, if complex, personality.”9 The connection between libido and thanatos that Ishtar’s sensuality and ferocity imply is hardly unique to her. (A similarly complex combination of opposites is evident in the goddess Anat in Canaan, the goddess Kali in India, and any of a number of humans we might think of in our personal
which the tabernacle was completed, the divine presence entered it, its altar was purified, and its priesthood was installed. The second ceremony was a highly orchestrated twelve-day service, described in Numbers 7, during which each of the twelve tribes brought identical gifts to the tabernacle.5 According to P, the tabernacle, rather than Mount Sinai, was also the place from which God’s law code was revealed starting in Leviticus 1.1 (the lawgiving at Sinai depicted in Exodus occurs only in J
place, or culture.67 One impulse emphasizes what the theorist of religion Rudolph Otto called fascinans, the aspect of divinity that humans find alluring and appealing.68 This impulse produces a desire to approach the divine, and hence it reflects a hope that God is locatable, even in a physical sense. Indeed, it reflects a sense that God can somehow become usable. Such a divinity is the foundation of order. The other impulse is rooted in what Otto calls the tremendum – the overwhelming,
came down “in bodily form” (swmatik ); and most interestingly, in Mark that the spirit actually entered Jesus (kataba±non e«v aÉt»n; the other Gospels describe it as coming down on him [pì aÉt»n]).45 This event can be read as an apotheosis – that is, an event in which a deity’s self comes to overlap in part, though of course only in part, with the self of a human being.46 Much the same may be said of the transfiguration (Mark 9.2–8, Matthew 17.1–9, Luke 9.28–36). In this clear reflex of the old
for the existence of many gods, but on further reflection one comes to understand that this definition is no less sensible than the narrow one. On the contrary, it is much more sensible. Let us imagine a theology in which there is one supreme being as well as many other beings who have some degree of free will and self-consciousness. These other beings may be mortal or immortal, or they may be both; that is, they may be able to achieve immortality after they die. In such a theology, it is clear