In Genesis, Adam and Eve hear Yahweh’s footsteps approaching as he walks in the Garden of Eden; later in the same book, Abraham sees Yahweh standing with two other divine beings beneath a group of sacred trees, and subsequently goes for a walk with him. Soon after, Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, encounters Yahweh standing next to him in a sacred space at Bethel (Genesis 3.8; 18.1–2, 16, 22, 33; 28.13). In the book of Exodus, Moses meets God several times. When he first sees Yahweh in his corporeal form, the deity is standing on a magical rock in the wilderness. Later, when Moses ascends Mount Sinai with a group of tribal elders, God is seen again – along with a stunning close-up of the heavenly floor on which his feet rest (Exodus 24.9–10). When the biblical story moves to Jerusalem, God’s feet are there, too. This time, they are surrounded by the fragrant trees of an Eden-like temple garden, which, Yahweh says, ‘glorify where my feet rest’ (Isaiah 60.13). ‘This is the place for the soles of my feet, where I will reside among the people of Israel forever’, he declares of his temple in the city (Ezekiel 43.7).
The identification of standing stones with a divine presence continued throughout the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE) and the Iron Age (1200– 539 BCE). During this long period, these stones were common – though not uniform – features of temples and other ritual spaces across the southern Levant. And these very ancient ideas about divine presence played a crucial role in shaping the God of the Bible and the places at which he stood.
These body rituals underlie the dominant territorial ideologies of the Bible, in which God vows to give the land of Canaan to the Israelites: in Deuteronomy, Yahweh promises the Israelites that ‘every place where the soles of your feet tread will be yours’; in Genesis, he commands Abraham to ‘walk through the length and breadth of the land’ of Canaan, ‘for I will give it to you’ (Genesis 13.17; Deuteronomy 11.24). God’s minister of justice in the book of Job, whose task it is to ‘go to and fro on the earth’ and ‘walk up and down on it’, policing its inhabitants and punishing those unfaithful to God (Job 2.2). Like the pharaoh, the biblical God also used his sandals to mark the subjugation of an enemy: ‘On Edom I hurl my shoe!’ he boasts in the Psalms, refocusing what might appear to Western eyes as a divine temper tantrum into a violent act of territorial expansion into a neighbouring nation (Psalms 60.8; 108.9).
Yahweh’s shoes were not as ornate as Tutankhamun’s, but they were no less authoritative. Cult images of southern Levantine gods suggest they usually wore delicate leather sandals not dissimilar to flip-flops. The ideological, rather than practical purpose of divine footwear is evident in a small statue of one of Yahweh’s immediate cultural predecessors – a high god from fourteenth-century BCE Hazor, in what is today modern Israel. Seated in ceremonial glory on a now-missing throne, the deity wears sandals accessorized with snazzy wedged heels, giving him an additional authoritative lift (Plate 4) (Tallay Ornan, ‘ “Let Ba‘al Be Enthroned”: The Date, Identification, and Function of a Bronze Statue from Hazor’, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies 70(2), 2011, pp. 253–80).
In the Bible, the battle is fought between Yahweh and the aqueous chaos monster, whose various names attest to its dangerously disordered, unbounded nature. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, God follows up his victory over the monster by pinning its watery body beneath his throne in his temple in Jerusalem. ‘Yahweh sits enthroned over the flood! Yahweh sits enthroned as king forever!’ went the ancient ritual refrain (Psalm 29.10).
But in the Hebrew Bible, the only proper place for chaos was beneath the feet of the deity enthroned in his temple in Jerusalem. The building itself was located on the deity’s ‘holy mountain’, Zion, where the vast elevated plaza known in Jewish tradition as Har Habayit (‘Temple Mount’) and in Islamic tradition as Haram al-Sharif (‘Noble Sanctuary’) stands today. The classic study of this motif is Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
Yahweh’s footsteps on the mountaintops demonstrate his dominion and his role as guarantor of cosmic order (Amos 4.13).
When the God of the Bible had declared the Jerusalem temple to be the place for the soles of his feet, he meant it literally. And his worshippers knew it, too.
