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 walls of their synagogue, painting a picture of a highly sociable, corporeal deity. Of all parts of his body, God’s hands had long been the most socially active – because our own are, too. Our hands are the body parts with which each of us is most familiar: they are the features we first encounter and explore in the womb, raising them to our mouths to sense their feel and form; throughout our lives, they are the parts of ourselves we see most often, most of the time, most days.
The left hand, by contrast, is often associated with death, danger and misfortune. For many communities, both ancient and modern, this is the hand which does not carry food to the mouth, but instead wipes away faeces and urine. In Western societies, this is the hand which gives its name, via Latin, to all that is sinister (literally, ‘left’). Like El of Ugarit, the God of the Bible was rooted in a culture in which the right hand was righteous. It is with his right hand that Yahweh rescues his people from slavery in Egypt; it is with his right hand and arm that he clears the Promised Land of its indigenous inhabitants to make space for the Israelites; it is with his right hand that he grasps his worshippers; it is at the right hand of God that Christ will sit in heaven. And it is with his hands, of course, that he also shapes the first human from clay. God plants a garden and shapes the first man from clay in Genesis 2.4–8. In this paragraph, I also allude to examples of the deity’s creative handiwork in Numbers 24.6; Isaiah 40.12, 22; Amos 4.13; Job 38.4–6; Psalms 95.4; 104.2; Proverbs 30.4
Yahweh inherited both the battle and its body language from his older cultural cousins, Baal and Anat, both of whom laid claim to vanquishing the aqueous enemy. In mythological texts from Late Bronze Age Ugarit, Anat’s victory is only briefly mentioned: ‘Surely I fought Yam, the Beloved of El’, she boasts; ‘Surely I bound Dragon and destroyed him; I fought the Twisty Serpent, the Seven-headed Encircler!’ (KTU 1.3 iii 40–41; following Wyatt, Religious Texts, p. 79).
It is a place misremembered in later tradition as the Red Sea, but named in the Hebrew Bible as the mythic yam suf, ‘Sea of Reeds’ – a deadly body of cosmic water equipped with dangerous twisting limbs or tails to ensnare its enemies (See further Nicolas Wyatt, Space and Time in the Religious Life of the Near East (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), p. 86). Extolling the deity with the cry ‘Yahweh is a warrior!’ it makes no mention of Moses, and instead focuses on Yahweh’s victory over watery chaos – here named as the primeval enemies Yam (Sea) and Tehom (Deep) – and his weaponizing of its parts to defeat the Egyptian army (Exodus 15.1–18 here, verses 4–10). Throughout the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh’s ‘strong hand’ and ‘outstretched arm’ are repeatedly praised in ways evoking the powerful stance of a typical divine warrior, whose iconography was so well known across the Levant. Yahweh is presented as a deity of menace, whose arm is raised above his head, his fist clenched, poised to strike: ‘Yours is an arm with might! Your hand is strong, your right hand raised!’ (Psalm 89.13).
The idea that God’s powerful arm was merely sleeping, rather than weakened or broken, was typical of ancient religious devotion. Despite the destruction of his temple in Jerusalem, Yahweh was not a god who had been defeated by Babylon, but a deity who had deliberately abandoned his people, withdrawing his powerful, protective arm. ‘Why do you hold back your hand?’ went the plaintive cry. ‘Why do you keep your hand in your bosom?’ (Psalm 74.11). If the divine arm was sleeping, it was because Yahweh was, too. Across the ancient world, restful sleep was as normal an activity for gods as it was for humans, and some temples were equipped with ornate beds to which their divine residents would retire at night (Barbara Nevling Porter, ‘Feeding Dinner to a Bed: Reflections on the Nature of Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 15, 2006, pp. 307–31).
Many centuries later, in the sixth century BCE, Yahweh’s worshippers were singing petitions to awaken him to the devastating aftermath of the Babylonian attack. ‘Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Yahweh? Awake! Do not cast us off forever!’ (Psalm 44.24).
The idea that a god might need to rescue his own reputation was not uncommon – but it did give rise to one of the most extraordinary verses in the Bible. He flexes his muscular arm like a bodybuilder as he accompanies his repatriated exiles in triumphal procession back to Jerusalem; lookouts in the city spy him covered in blood, his holy arm held aloft, as he returns from a quick detour to punish the Edomites, who had helped the Babylonians to destroy his temple (Isaiah 52.8; 63.1–6. I borrow the image of God as a bodybuilder from Stephen D. Moore, God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), especially pp. 75–138).
