The divine penis-bow has indeed been remembered – although not quite as Marduk might have expected. Instead, it is associated with Yahweh, the God of the Bible. He too is a warrior deity, whose signature weapons of thunderbolts, lightning strikes and torrential rains are equated with the devastating impact of his mighty bow and speeding arrows. Like Marduk’s bow Deluge, Yahweh’s bow is identified with his erect penis – albeit in the euphemistic language of bare flesh: ‘You brandish your bow of nakedness! You satisfy the shafts of your bowstring!’ enthuses the prophet Habakkuk in his gloriously graphic vision of Yahweh as the ultimate phallic warrior (Habakkuk 3.9. My translation draws on J. J. M. Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), p. 129). His weapon is so intimidating that when he approaches, his enemies’ own bows slacken and droop, their penises sink and their genitals tremble (Isaiah 13.7–8; Jeremiah 51.56; Ezekiel 21.6; Nahum 2.10). Of course, it is with his phallic bow that Yahweh – like Marduk – is said to have defeated the great sea monster, piercing its body to expose its innards (Psalm 18.13–15; Habakkuk 3.8–10; cf. Isaiah 51.9–10; Job 26.13). Yahweh memorializes his subjugation of the deadly waters by suspending his war bow in the heavens. ‘My bow I have placed in the cloud’, he declares. ‘When I bring a cloud over the earth, and the bow appears in the cloud, I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living being, so that waters shall not again become a flood to annihilate all flesh’ (Genesis 9.13–15).

If Adam was made in the image of God, as it is twice claimed in Genesis, he must have been circumcised, the rabbis reasoned, for God was circumcised, too (Judah Goldin (ed. and trans.), The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 23).

Like a budding vine clipped into fruitfulness, so El’s circumcised penis brings forth children in his new marriages – infant deities whose own genitalia (‘grapes’ and ‘tendrils’) are inspected by a birth goddess to ensure they are in order (KTU 1.23. Here, I follow Wyatt, Religious Texts, pp. 326–27. See further Nicolas Wyatt, ‘Circumcision and Circumstance: Male Genital Mutilation in Ancient Israel and Ugarit’, in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33(4), 2009, pp. 405–31).

God’s first sexual encounter occurs long before the birth of the Nephilim. In the Garden of Eden, food from the sacred tree might have been off the menu, but sating sexual appetites was divinely ordained. ‘I have procreated a man with Yahweh!’ (Genesis 4.1). The very language of this Hebrew text signals a bodily dynamic well beyond this, for the woman’s words are pointedly precise: she is claiming that Yahweh has fathered her first child. Although in her biblical form she is a human woman, her choice of vocabulary is the language of goddesses: in asserting that she has ‘procreated’ a man, she uses a specialized, technical term for divine reproduction also used of goddesses in the myths from Ugarit (David E. Bokovoy, ‘Did Eve Acquire, Create, or Procreate with Yahweh? A Grammatical and Contextual Reassessment of in Genesis 4:1’, in Vetus Testamentum 63(1), 2013, pp. 19–35). In the Bible, however, God’s most significant and sexualized relationship is not with a goddess or a goddess-like figure, but with his other wife, Israel. The personification of a city, territory, nation or social group as a woman is well attested in (often masculinist, patriarchal) cultures across the globe, but in the biblical texts, the female personification of Israel plays a sustained and crucial role in articulating the intense and exclusive relationship between God and his worshippers. It is a relationship so intimate that his love for them is frequently expressed in the language of sexual desire.

The book of Hosea offers a vivid example. Here, Israel is a capricious teenager whose sexual allure so intoxicates God, he falls to scheming obsessively and possessively to make her his wife. ‘I will now seduce her’, he says of Israel; ‘I will take her walking into the wilderness and speak to her heart . . . and there she will cry out’ (Hosea 2.14–15). In claiming he will ‘seduce’ her, he uses a Hebrew expression more usually employed in the Bible to describe the rape of captive women. God’s dangerous sense of sexual entitlement skews his planned attack on the girl into the distorted conviction that she will enjoy her rape – and scream in orgasmic ecstasy (Mayer I. Gruber, Hosea: A Textual Commentary (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), p. 147). This image of sexual violation is unsettling enough. But nowhere in the Bible is the portrayal of God’s sex life more disturbing than in two stories in the book of Ezekiel. Like other biblical narrators, Ezekiel reasons that the military defeat and imperial subjugation that befell Yahweh’s people in the sixth century BCE was a divine punishment for worshipping other gods. Here, too, Israel is cast as God’s wife, but her whoring after foreign deities provokes her husband’s fury and punishment. According to Ezekiel, her wanton behaviour in marriage is the culmination of a long history of social and sexual deviancy. Their relationship begins in the wilderness, where God finds an abandoned baby girl, her umbilical cord still attached, deliberately cast away from the rest of humanity: ‘You were abhorred on the day of your birth’, scorns God, as he reminds her that she had been neither washed of birth blood, nor rubbed with a protective salt scrub and swaddled (Ezekiel 16.4–6). And yet God acknowledges her, commanding her to live and grow. Only when she has obediently matured to puberty does he notice her again. Reminiscing lasciviously about this subsequent encounter, God comments: ‘. . . your breasts were formed, your [pubic] hair had grown; you were naked and bare! I passed by you and looked at you: you were at the age for lovemaking. I spread the corner of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness; I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you . . . You became mine’ (Ezekiel 16.7–8). The Hebrew indicates that the girl’s hair has ‘sprouted’ or ‘sprung up’, implying it is pubic growth.

The sexual euphemisms continue, for it is by penetrating the girl’s body that God ‘enters into’ a binding covenant with her – an unequal power relationship in which the forging of the deity’s exclusive and proprietary claim to Israel is presented as the sexual consummation of a man’s possession of a bride: ‘you became mine’ (Fokkelien Van DijkHemmes, ‘The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech: An Analysis of Ezekiel XXIII’, in Vetus Testamentum 43(2), 1993, pp. 162–70; Linda M. Day, ‘Rhetoric and Domestic Violence in Ezekiel 16’, in Biblical Interpretation 8(3), 2000, pp. 205–30 (especially pp. 214–16); Gale Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 111–134; Sharon Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Aaron Koller, ‘Pornography or Theology? The Legal Background, Psychological Realism, and Theological Import of Ezekiel 16’, in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 79(3), 2017, pp. 402–21). The biblical God cannot and should not be let off the hook. Here, he is a predatory alpha male, whose sexual entitlement entirely shapes the identity and fate of this displaced and vulnerable young girl. Indeed, it is only after sex that God formally rehabilitates his young bride by means of actions reminiscent of the rituals denied her at birth: he bathes her, washing away the dried blood of birth and the wet blood of puberty, and then rubs her not with salt, but with sacred oil.

For God, this is a fruitful relationship: the girl gives birth to his sons and daughters – God’s own worshippers (Ezekiel 16.20–21; cf. 23.37). According to God, her sexual deviancy is so depraved that she pays her lovers for sex with the treasures received from her husband: ‘Gifts are given to all whores, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from all around for your whorings!’ He shames her further, accusing her of being in such a permanent state of impure arousal that her vagina constantly drips with wetness (Ezekiel 16.32–36. See Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 285–86; David Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 146; S. Tamar Kamionkowski, ‘Gender Reversal in Ezekiel 16’, in Athalya Brenner (ed.), Prophets and Daniel: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (second series) (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), pp. 170–85 (here, p. 177); Paul M. Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2007), p. 132). Her punishment is brutal: God gathers her lovers and strips her naked in front of them; her legs are wrenched apart, her genitalia exposed. It is an invitation to gang-rape her. A mob is summoned – to stone her, cut her, stab her and set her home alight. This scene of graphic, frenzied sexual violence is the theological money-shot, for the brutality wrought against his wife triggers in God a climactic gratification, by which his psychosexual anger suddenly appears spent: ‘Thus I will satisfy my fury on you, and my jealousy shall turn away from you; I will be calm, and will be angry no longer’ (Ezekiel 16.37–42. My language here is deliberately loaded. Biblicalscholars frequently describe this material in Ezekiel (and similar iterations in Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah) as ‘pornoprophetic’ or ‘prophetic pornography’, following T. Drorah Setel, ‘Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea’, in Letty M. Russell (ed.) Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1985), pp. 86–95. See too Athalya Brenner, ‘Pornoprophetics Revisited: Some Additional Remarks’, in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 28, 1990, pp. 63–89). Once she has learned her lesson, he will take her back. In a parallel narrative, a few chapters later, God again looks back on his alleged cuckolding with venomous fury. Their sexual crimes, God claims, begin even before he makes them his brides: in their youth, they seek out the Egyptians, cast as animalized foreigners with penises ‘like those of donkeys’ and gushing semen ‘like that of stallions’, who squeeze and fondle the young girls’ breasts and ejaculate over them (Ezekiel 23.5–8, 19–21. See Kamionkowski, ‘Gender Reversal in Ezekiel 16’, pp. 174–7). God’s violent response is again profoundly disturbing: he gathers his wives’ lovers, who strip the sisters naked and abuse them. Oholah’s children are seized, and she is put to death by the sword (Ezekiel 23.9–10). God decrees she will use its jagged pieces to mutilate herself, gnawing on its sherds and hacking off her breasts (Ezekiel 23.31–34).

Theologically, the sexual grooming and graphic violence God inflicts on his young wife is immensely difficult for some modern-day believers to reconcile with their idealized constructs of God. But for many Jewish and Christian readers, it is more specifically the graphic portrayal of a sexually active deity that has proved unbearable: it has been mistranslated, dismissed as ‘mere’ allegory, or simply ignored. Indeed, by the second century CE, the story of God having sex with his pubescent bride in Ezekiel was banned by the rabbis from public reading in the synagogue – a ruling attributed to Rabbi Eliezer (c. 100 CE), who was said to have interrupted a man reading aloud the opening words of the story (‘Mortal, proclaim to Jerusalem her abominations’) with the sarcastic rebuke, ‘Why don’t you go out and proclaim the abominations of your mother? ’ (m. Megillah 4.10; t. Megillah 3.34).

A grammatical reassessment of the Semitic root qnh/qny, as well as a careful contextual reading of Eve’s statement supports the view of interpreting Genesis 4:1b as “I have procreated a man with Yahweh.”