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. This idea finds expression in the Hebrew Bible, in which the common myth of divine usurpation is reworked in the story of Jacob, whose name means ‘heel taker’ or ‘supplanter’. The book of Hosea pointedly draws a parallel with Jacob’s attempt to take on God himself in a wrestling match at the River Jabbok: ‘In the womb he took his brother by the heel; and in his manhood he strove with God’ (Genesis 25.21–34; Hosea 12.3).

It is the cult statue of Yahweh that is envisaged by the biblical writers when they affirm that ‘the ark of the covenant of Yahweh of Hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim’ duly entered the war camp. The arrival of the deity and his divine entourage (‘hosts’) prompts such a rapturous response from the Israelite soldiers that the Philistines quickly realize what has happened. ‘Gods have come into the camp!’ they cry. ‘Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods?’ 1 Samuel 4.7. On the probability that a cult statue of Yahweh is assumed in this story, see Thomas Römer, ‘Y avait-il une statue de Yhwh dans le premier temple? Enquêtes littéraires à travers la Bible hébraïque’, Asdiwal 2, 2007, pp. 41–58 (here, pp. 49–50).

As both his footstool and a mobile shrine, Yahweh’s ark was a part of his person seemingly external to his body, but barely distinguishable from him. The two were one and the same. When Yahweh moved, so did the ark. And when the deity came to rest, the ark did too, as one biblical writer explains, citing what appears to be an ancient incantation: ‘Whenever the ark set out, Moses would say, “Arise, O Yahweh, let your enemies be scattered, and your foes flee before you!” And whenever it came to rest, he would say, “Return, O Yahweh, to Israel’s teeming myriads!” (Numbers 10.35–36). And it is at odds with the ritual refrain sung by worshippers as they watched what was likely a statue of their deity process about the city and into the temple: ‘Rise up, O Yahweh, and go to your resting place, you and the ark of your might!’ (Psalm 132.8).

The insistence that the divine footstool was actually a specialized – if sacred – container for holy writings marks a relatively early theological assault on the body of God, whose material presence, once manifest in the Iron Age temples of ancient Israel and Judah as a divine statue or cultic object, would gradually come to be replaced in ritual by the Torah. In synagogues, which emerged only during the latter half of the Second Temple period (c. 515 BCE – 70 CE), this displacement would come to be underscored by the small ‘ark’ or shrine in which the Torah scrolls were housed, which took its name from the ark of the covenant. See the examples in Steven D. Fraade, ‘Facing the Holy Ark: In Words and Images’, in Near Eastern Archaeology 82(3), 2019, pp. 156–63.

For many, the permanent destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE meant that synagogues inevitably became the places at which God now set his feet. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael 11.47–49, adapting the translation in Jacob Z. Lauterbach (ed.), Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition, vol. 1 (second edition) (Philadelphia, PA:Jewish Publication Society, 2004). Aharon Oppenheimer, ‘Babylonian Synagogues with Historical Associations’, in Dan Urman and Paul V. M. Flesher (eds.), Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 40–48 (here, pp. 41–2); Steven Fine, ‘From Meeting House to Sacred Realm: Holiness and the Ancient Synagogue’, in Steven Fine (ed.), Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 21–47.

When the Late Bronze Age goddess Athirat pays a visit to her husband El, he is so delighted to see her that ‘he unfurrowed his brow and laughed; he set his feet on the footstool, and wiggled his toes’ (KTU 1.4 iv 23–30). He descends from his throne and sits on his footstool, and then lowers himself from his footstool to sit upon the ground to mourn. ‘Baal is dead! What has become of the Powerful One?’ he cries. ‘After Baal I shall go down into the underworld!’ (KTU 1.5 vi 23–25). Cosmic order is only restored when El foresees the return of Baal and his rains, and re-seats himself on the throne, pointedly setting his feet on his footstool once again. ‘At last I can sit and rest’, El declares, ‘for alive is mighty Baal!’ (KTU 1.6 iii 14–20). In the Jerusalem temple, Yahweh’s footstool also functioned as a ritual manifestation of the earthly realm upon which the deity set his feet.

The storm clouds enveloping Yahweh’s cherubic mount were an especially celebrated feature of his divine vigour, and were already imagined as a sky chariot. ‘Sing to God, sing praises to his name!’ worshippers sang in the Jerusalem temple. ‘Lift up the charioteer of the clouds! Yah is his name, therefore exalt before him!’ (Psalm 68.4). The high god of Jerusalem remained seated in glory, his feet firmly fixed on his footstool, as he wheeled out of his city to join his exiles in Babylonia: ‘Though I removed them far away among the nations, and though I scattered them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them’, he declared (Ezekiel 11.16).

Instead, the gigantism of God proved the deity remained seated in glory. ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool!’ Yahweh emphatically declared (Isaiah 66.1). Others, however, understood the text more literally, and cast the earth itself as the divine footstool of God, later prompting some rabbis and (according to Matthew’s Gospel) Jesus of Nazareth to forbid their followers from ‘blasphemously’ invoking the earth in swearing ritual oaths (Matthew 5.34–37. For rabbinic parallels, see Dennis C. Duling, ‘ “[Do Not Swear . . . ] by Jerusalem Because it is the City of the Great King” (Matt. 5:35)’, in Journal of Biblical Literature 110(2), 1991, pp. 291–309).

But several Jewish and Christian communities clearly embraced the divine corporeality presented in Isaiah, and quite reasonably assumed that God’s body was so gigantic it reached from earth to heaven. It was a scripturally endorsed belief that would become increasingly problematic – particularly for early Christian thinkers, who preferred the divine body to take the form of Christ, rather than that of a supersized deity more akin to the ‘pagan’ deities of Rome. A favourite tactic employed by early Christian theologians was simply to reduce all biblical references to God’s body to the symbolic. When the scriptures instructed people to worship at God’s footstool, it was towards the cross to which Christ’s feet were nailed that worshippers were directed. Another strategy, of course, was simply to insist that biblical references to God’s body parts were metaphorical and allegorical, and were not to be taken literally. ‘Reverence rather requires . . . an allegorical meaning’, wrote Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 CE). ‘You must not entertain the notion at all of figure and motion, or standing or seating, or place, or right or left, as appertaining to the Father of the universe, although these terms are in Scripture’.

Instead, Clement argued, the biblical ascription of body parts to God was a divinely directed accommodation to the limitations of human understanding (Clement, Stromateis, 5.11.71.4). Some early Christian theologians navigated the disorientating portrayals of God’s feet by bending and stretching the temporal dimensions in which God was understood to walk in the world: when Adam and Eve had heard God walking in the garden, it was actually the sound of Christ as the pre-existent, spoken Word of God moving towards them (Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, 2.22; Irenaeus, Epideixis, 12). What is more certain, however, is that, by the third century CE, the Christian exegete and theologian Origen was so appalled by those who still conceived of God as a cosmic giant that he launched a scathing attack upon them in one of his famous homilies: ‘Those carnal men who have no understanding of the meaning of divinity suppose . . . that God has so large a body that they think he sits in heaven and stretches his feet to the earth.’ Rather, he argued, God could not possibly be corporeal. Influenced by his conviction that scripture often revealed its truths on ascending levels of spiritual insight (primarily the literal, the moral and the allegorical), Origen contended that the portrayal of God’s body in Isaiah was figurative in form and allegorical in nature. It served, he claimed, to illustrate the spiritual gulf between those ‘at the most remote part’ of God’s providence, who were too caught up in the literal, worldly affairs of the created realm, and those at the head end of the Creator God, who sought to acquire a heavenly ‘perfection of life and loftiness of understanding’ as true Christians (Origen, Homiliae in Genesim, 1.13).

https://www.academia.edu/44876551/_Facing_the_Holy_Ark_In_Words_and_in_Images_