Throughout the Hebrew Bible, it is the intensity of a face-to-face encounter with God that worshippers most desire. ‘When shall I come and behold the face of God?’ one plaintively asks in the book of Psalms. ‘I shall behold your face, I shall take my fill, wide awake, of your image!’ promises another (Psalms 17.15;…

YHWH kills Moses by his command in Deuteronomy. Yahweh’s burial of Moses was one of a number of encounters the deity undertook with the material remains of the dead. Although his priests in Jerusalem would eventually come to impose a strict separation between the sacred and the sepulchral, fearing the cultural ‘dirt’ of death would…

The Jewish community of third-century CE Dura inherited this biblical understanding of God’s body: he was a hands-on deity, who had repeatedly reached into the earthly realm to shape the lived experiences of his people. In a diverse and vibrant city on the edge of empires, this small Jewish community celebrated God’s handedness on the…

Like Adam, Cain is sent away from Yahweh’s presence, and away from the soil he tills, to scratch an existence from the uncultivated, unyielding dust at the ends of the earth (Genesis 4.1–16). By contrast, Abel sacrifices the cream of his crop: ‘the firstlings of his flock, their fatty parts’ (Genesis 4.3–4). The pieces he…

An oracle in the book of Jeremiah is particularly visceral in its description of the intense emotions experienced by Yahweh. Dated to the early sixth century BCE, its setting is the Babylonian attack on Jerusalem and the destruction of the city’s temple complex – described in traditional language as the ‘tents’ and ‘curtains’ of the…

The divine penis-bow has indeed been remembered – although not quite as Marduk might have expected. Instead, it is associated with Yahweh, the God of the Bible. He too is a warrior deity, whose signature weapons of thunderbolts, lightning strikes and torrential rains are equated with the devastating impact of his mighty bow and speeding…

Augustine’s formulation of humanity’s ‘original sin’ would quickly become a central doctrine of the Western Church. Eve became a temptress who led her husband into religious deviancy. Transgression led to sexualization, rendering innocent nudity shameful nakedness. The first humans fell away from God, exchanging the easy intimacy of the garden for the sweat, pain and…

While archaeological finds depicting Yahweh and Asherah together were prominent in the period up to the 7th century (the Kuntillet Ajrud inscription, which we constantly spam, depicting Yahweh with a cock and Asherah), these findings disappear after the 7th century. Considering that all the polemics against Asherah are in the texts of the Deuteronomist school…

Within this world, the feet of the gods were as tactile and as sensory as those of their worshippers. Just as human bodies experienced the visceral carnage of warfare, the dry rustle of the threshing floor, or the squelch of the wine press, so too did the bodies of the gods. Mythic texts abound with…

Underlying these myths was the widespread notion that the back of the foot was a point of particular vulnerability and weakness in the body – as Achilles is said to have discovered during the fabled battle of Troy. Accordingly, the back of the foot was the place at which hierarchies of power might be disrupted.…