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 unruly sexual desire of the carnal world. And yet there is nothing in the biblical story of Eden to suggest that the covering of the genitals reflects the sin of sexuality. Rather, it is a tale about the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and the threat they now pose to God, who shares with his divine colleagues in the heavenly council his worry that, in acquiring wisdom, the humans have become ‘like one of us’.

Unsurprisingly, early Christian sex advice appears not to have been wildly popular, for believers continued having children. By the second century CE, some Jewish laws were stipulating that a man must have sex with his wife at least once a week, and seek her permission before taking a job that would require prolonged absences from the marital bed (David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 53–4).

Ezekiel describes his vision of God in sumptuous – if at times baffling – detail. He sees a large dark cloud enveloped by flashes of fire, with a shining brightness emanating from within. Inside the cloud are four giant cherubim – the enormous hybrid beings who accompany the deity. Each one has four faces (one human, one leonine, one bovine and one like an eagle). He describes their legs (straight), their feet (bronzed hooves) and their wings (four each, with human hands attached), which create a thundering rumble as they move. Above the cherubim, he sees a wheeled, mobile throne of lapis lazuli, upon which is seated a figure whose form is ‘like a human being’. It is God. As Ezekiel describes God, he knows exactly where to look and what to say – or rather, where to look and what not to say. His gaze sweeps up and down God’s body, but he no longer describes precisely what he sees. Instead, he veils the deity in the religious language of glorious, mysterious spectacle: ‘Upward from what looked to be his motnayim, I saw it sparkling like amber, it seemed to be enveloped all around by fire. And from his motnayim downward I saw something like fire. And brilliance surrounded him. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, this was the appearance of the brilliance all around’ (Ezekiel 1.27–28). But Ezekiel leaves exposed one body part: God’s motnayim, a Hebrew term traditionally (and politely) rendered ‘loins’ or ‘waist’, but which more accurately refers to the groin and its genitals (Roland Boer, The Earthy Nature of the Bible: Fleshy Readings of Sex, Masculinity, and Carnality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 51; Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus – and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 180–81). Ezekiel might shy away from describing God’s face, his torso, his arms, legs and feet, but he openly acknowledges God’s genitals, navigating his visual journey up and down the divine body by means of the godly groin. It is not only a stunning display of the graphic corporeality of God, but a theological manifestation of the distance and difference between mortals and God: if in Genesis human bodies are made culturally visible by the covering of their genitals, in Ezekiel, God’s body is mysteriously, transcendently concealed by the exposure of his.

Ezekiel is not the only biblical figure to acknowledge God’s genitals. The prophet Isaiah is said to have had a similarly intimate encounter with the deity almost a century and a half earlier, in the mid eighth century BCE. In a scene still celebrated in Jewish and Christian prayer, Isaiah enters the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem temple and sees God enthroned. The deity is accompanied by seraphim – fiery flying serpents – each equipped with three pairs of wings. With one set they cover their faces; with another, they cover their genitals (euphemistically described as ‘feet’); with the other, they soar about the throne, crying out, ‘Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of Hosts! The whole earth is full of his glory! (Isaiah 6.3. On the seraphim (and examples of their images on stamp seals), see Izaak J. de Hulster, ‘Of Angels and Iconography: Isaiah 6 and the Biblical Concept of Seraphs and Cherubs’, in Izaak J. de Hulster, Brent A. Strawn and Ryan P. Bonfiglio (eds.), Iconographic Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: An Introduction to Its Method and Practice (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), pp. 147–64.). ‘I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lofty! His lower extremities filled the temple!’ (Isaiah 6.1, 5). Most ancient and modern translators reverently assume it is the hem of Yahweh’s great robe that swamps the space. But Isaiah makes no mention of a robe. Rather, the Hebrew term he employs to refer to the deity’s ‘lower extremities’, shul, is more commonly used by biblical prophets not to refer to the edges of garments, but to pointedly allude to the fleshy realities of the sexual organs (G. R. Driver, ‘Isaiah 6:1 “his train filled the temple” ’, in Hans Goedicke (ed.), Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright (Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 87–96; Lyle Eslinger, ‘The Infinite in a Finite Organical Perception (Isaiah VI 1–5)’, in Vetus Testamentum 45(2), 1995, pp. 145–73; cf. Gerlinde Baumann, Love and Violence: Marriage as Metaphor for the Relationship between YHWH and Israel in the Prophetic Books (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), pp. 52–55. For examples of the term’s genital use, see Jeremiah 13.22, 26; Nahum 3.5; Lamentations 1.9). In this vision in Isaiah, God’s genitals are enormous.

The scale of Yahweh’s genitalia is to be expected – not only because it belongs to a supersized body, but because Yahweh’s cultural father, the aged deity El, was similarly well equipped. In the mythological stories enshrined on the clay tablets of cosmopolitan Ugarit (c.1350–1200 BCE), El’s penis makes several appearances. In one myth, the god sets out along the serpentine seashore at the edge of the world, where he encounters two young goddesses. They urge him to get an erection and take them in body and marriage. The response is unambiguous: ‘El’s penis grew as long as the sea, El’s penis [grew as long] as the ocean’. Having installed them as brides in his home, he grasps his penis in his right hand and ‘shoots’ it skyward, like an arrow, to entice his new wives into consummating the marriage. They are suitably impressed with his masturbatory performance. El stoops to kiss them, relishing the pomegranate-sweet taste of their ‘lips’ – a delicately sensuous double entendre. Penetrative sex quickly follows, and El impregnates the goddesses, who bear him the ‘gracious gods’ Shahar (‘Dawn’) and Shalem (‘Dusk’) (KTU 1.23). El’s penis may have enthused his young brides, but his primary wife, the great mother goddess Athirat, is not as easily impressed by his penchant for occasional genital exhibition. Delighted to see her, El assumes her needs are bodily and scrambles to sate her appetites. He offers her rich food and fine wine – and then his penis: ‘Does the penis of El the King excite you? Does the love organ of the Bull arouse you?’ (KTU 1.4 iv 35–39).

In this story, El’s self-titling as ‘Bull’ is just as revealing as the flaunting of his penis. The bull was an enduring ancient symbol of an aggressively potent, unrestrained hyper-masculinity. It manifested military might, sexual prowess and divine generative power.

Among these high-status deities, it is no surprise to find that Yahweh, too, was often understood as the divine bull. Bovine language (the Hebrew term abbir) underlies his biblical designation as the ‘Mighty One [abir] of Jacob’ who grants genital fertility to the Israelite tribe of Joseph, and in some biblical texts, Yahweh’s cult statue is said to take the form of a bull or a bull calf (E.g., Genesis 49.24; Exodus 32; Numbers 23.21–22; 24.8; 1 Kings 12.28–32; 2 Kings 10.29; 17.16; Isaiah 1.24; 49.26; Hosea 8.5–6; 10.5; 13.2; Psalm 132.2, 5. For further discussion, see most recently Theodore J. Lewis, The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 197–8, 317–33. A fragmentary votive inscription, dated to the seventh century BCE, refers to a person named Abbiryahu (‘Yahu is a Bull’); see COS 2.49).

In this poem in the book of Hosea, dated to about the eighth century BCE, Yahweh’s penis may well be veiled from direct view, hidden behind a modesty screen of euphemism and wordplay, but the bodily, sexual connotations are impossible to miss. Like the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, who bear witness to Yahweh’s genitalia, the prophet Hosea is well aware that God is equipped with a penis – and it is large enough and potent enough to arouse and fertilize the heavens and the earth (Hosea 2.20–23. This translation draws on the discussion in Mayer I. Gruber, Hosea: A Textual Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2017), pp. 154–61).