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 detailed descriptions of their intense sensory experiences, some of which border on the monstrous. When she goes on the rampage against humans, the fearsome warrior goddess Anat is ‘up to her knees [as] she wades in the blood of soldiers, up to her neck in the gore of fighters’. It is a sensation she enjoys so much that when she returns home, she transforms the chairs and tables in her dining hall into an army of living victims, fresh for trampling (KTU 1.3 ii 5–30).

In Genesis, Yahweh is said to walk regularly in his Garden of Eden ‘at the time of the evening breeze’ – a fleeting but evocative detail conjuring the impression of a deity enjoying a stroll at the end of the day, his feet cooling as they brush through lush vegetation (Genesis 3.8). Outside the garden, however, walking could be hazardous, and Yahweh was at risk of stepping in something unpleasant if he didn’t take the necessary precautions. It is for this reason that he issues the Israelites travelling from Egypt to the Promised Land with special instructions for defecation: ‘You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go; with your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement, because Yahweh your god walks in your camp’ (Deuteronomy 23.12–14). The mythologies of this world suggest that the gods might similarly have encountered new lovers as they walked about. In a Sumerian myth, the high deity Enlil is out for a stroll along a riverbank when he meets the goddess Ninlil, resulting in the two having repeated and rampant sex. Similarly, at Ugarit, El’s bracing walk along the seashore leads to a highly erotic sexual encounter with two young goddesses, who consequently bear him divine children. For El, see KTU 1.23 in Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 324–35. For Enlil and Ninlil, see ETCSL 1.2.1 (lines 1–23). Key texts in this electronic corpus can also be found in Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gábor Zólyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Enoch, Noah and Abraham are all said to have walked with God – an activity more usually undertaken by minor deities such as Resheph and Deber, terrifying purveyors of plague and pestilence, who march alongside him in his marauding army (Genesis 5.22–24; 6.9; 18.16–33; Habakkuk 3.3–6). Yahweh is not the only deity to have perceived walking with male mortals in this way: in the Cyrus Cylinder inscription, the Persian king Cyrus the Great describes the Babylonian god Marduk walking alongside him on the road to Babylon ‘like a companion and friend’. For a translation of the Cyrus Cylinder, see COS 2.124. But on occasion, the biblical writers seem to have understood walking with God as a more corporeal activity: Abraham is portrayed as literally walking and talking with Yahweh and two of his divine colleagues on the road from Mamre towards Sodom (Genesis 18.16–33). In the preceding verses (1–15), Yahweh is not only human-shaped, but humansized – and he looks so much like an ordinary mortal that the other characters in the story are unaware that he is a deity. For some scholars, it is the most human-like portrayal of God in the Hebrew Bible. See Esther J. Hamori, ‘When Gods Were Men’: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008). And Yahweh enjoys Enoch’s company so much that even after 300 years of walking the earth together, the deity decides to lift him into the heavenly realm, where in a rich collection of early Jewish and Christian literature, Enoch continues to travel about heaven’s various dimensions, meeting its angelic inhabitants (Genesis 5.22–24).

1. On the Enoch traditions, see Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009); John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Volume 1: Sources from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). A near-naked Adam emerges from the foliage and shyly confesses to Yahweh that he could ‘hear the sound’ of him walking, and so had time to conceal his newly realized nudity among the trees.
2. Noisy feet were not usually a problem for the gods. Rather, the sonorous impact of divine footfall was a certain indication to humans in the earthly realm of the ongoing activity of their deities. The loud, heavy marching of the gods caused the earth to tremble and the mountains to quake, just as they did when Yahweh processed in imperial victory from his wilderness home to take possession of the land of Canaan. ‘O Yahweh, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the steppe of Edom, the earth trembled!’ his worshippers gleefully sang; ‘the mountains quaked before Yahweh, he of Sinai, before Yahweh, the god of Israel!’

Against this rich cultural backdrop, the fetishizing of Jesus’ feet as the site of both religious and erotic veneration is unsurprising – and persistent. Extending across centuries of Christianity, sexualized encounters with Christ’s feet litter the religious works of theologians, bishops, monks and mystics. In the closing decades of the fourth century, Jerome was battling his sexual urges while on ascetic retreat in the Syrian desert, likening himself to the sensuous sinner of Luke’s Gospel: ‘Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears, I wiped them with my hair, and then I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinence’. At around the same time, Bishop Paulinus of Nola was fantasizing about touching the heel of Christ with the tip of his tongue so that he could ‘lick the divine feet’ (Jerome, Epistulae, 22.7, trans. F. A. Wright, Jerome: Select Letters (Loeb Classical Library, 262; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Paulinus, Letters, 23.38, trans. P. G. Walsh, Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola, vol. 2 (Paramus, NJ: Paulist Press, 1967). Jerome, Epistulae, 22.7, trans. F. A. Wright, Jerome: Select Letters (Loeb Classical Library, 262; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Paulinus, Letters, 23.38, trans. P. G. Walsh, Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola, vol. 2 (Paramus, NJ: Paulist Press, 1967). Mark S. Burrows, ‘Foundations for an Erotic Christology: Bernard of Clairvaux on Jesus as “Tender Lover” ’, in Anglican Theological Review 80(4), 1998, pp. 477–93; Anthony Bale (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 83, 186. See further Louise Nelstrop, ‘Erotic and Nuptial Imagery’, in Edward Howells and Mark A. McIntosh (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 328–46.

But it is within a collection of medieval mystical traditions known as the Zohar that the fetishization of God’s feet is most explicitly sexualized. Emerging in thirteenth-century Spain, but claimed to derive from the visions and homilies of a wandering band of Roman-era Palestinian sages and rabbis, the Zohar decodes and then recodes biblical texts and Jewish teachings, and is the foundational literature of later Kabbalah and Hasidism. At its heart is the notion that something of the inscrutable, infinite God (Ein Sof) can be grasped via the world of the sefirot – the ten interactive ‘dimensions’ or ‘emanations’ of God in the created world (such as goodness, justice, separation and wisdom) by which humans can experience divine responsiveness. Within this highly esoteric, multilayered theological scheme, God is not only embodied, but the divine body comprises male and female principles, which can engage tenderly and sexually with one another. Encouraged by the biblical tendency to associate the feet with genitalia, the sexualized masculinity of God (a form of the ninth dimension, known as Yesod) is frequently correlated with his feet, with which the feminine aspect of the presence of God, the Shekhinah (cast as the tenth dimension) engages and unites, erotically and sexually. In the Zohar, God’s feet become powerfully coded symbols of the spiritualized divine penis (Wolfson, ‘Images of God’s Feet’, pp. 162–73).