Yes, God Does Have a Body
Adam Kirsch has a very enthusiastic review of Benjamin Sommer’s The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel
The title of The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, the ingenious new book by Benjamin D. Sommer, sounds like a paradox, and a provocative one. After all, if there’s one thing everyone knows about Judaism, it is that the Jewish God does not have even one body, much less bodies in the plural. The gods of Greece and Egypt may have had bodies, but wasn’t the great innovation of Jewish monotheism its insistence that the divine is wholly transcendent? Doesn’t Judaism—like Islam, but markedly unlike Christianity—ban depictions of God from its places of worship? Just remember the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”
As Sommer shows, however, it is the things everyone knows, especially when it comes to religion and the Bible, that usually turn out to be myths. That is why the very first sentences of the book insist, “The God of the Hebrew Bible has a body. This must be stated at the outset, because so many people, including many scholars, assume otherwise.” A professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Sommer begins his closely argued study by reminding us of all the instances in the Bible where it is taken for granted that God has not just a body, but a specifically human or human-like one.