Throughout the Hebrew Bible, it is the intensity of a face-to-face encounter with God that worshippers most desire. ‘When shall I come and behold the face of God?’ one plaintively asks in the book of Psalms. ‘I shall behold your face, I shall take my fill, wide awake, of your image!’ promises another (Psalms 17.15; 42.2).

Of all the Bible’s characters, it is Moses who is repeatedly said to have enjoyed a face-to-face relationship with the deity: ‘Yahweh would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend’ (Exodus 33.11). It is a point about which the deity himself is unequivocal, highlighting the physical intimacy of their conversations: ‘With him I speak mouth to mouth – an appearance, not in riddles; and he gazes at the form of Yahweh’ (Numbers 12.8). Moses does not simply see Yahweh, but looks at him: he talks to him, he listens to him and engages with him. And having spent forty days and nights with Yahweh on Sinai, it is the corporeal, visual intensity of this social bond with the deity which is understood to transfigure Moses’ face in the book of Exodus (Exodus 34.29–35). Other Yahweh worshippers also felt the visceral transformative power of seeing their god. In a psalm, one describes the encounter as the stark difference between famine and feast: ‘My throat thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water’, he exclaims, ‘so I looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your strength and glory . . . my throat is sated with fat and fatness’ (Psalm 63.1–5). Moses commands the Israelites, ‘they shall not see the face of Yahweh empty-handed; all shall give as they are able’ (Deuteronomy 16.16–17). Following a pious emendation in antiquity, modern Bibles translate these verses slightly differently, distorting the instruction to ‘see’ the face of the deity into the command to ‘appear’ before the deity. Biblical scholars are widely agreed that the former is the originalsense of the Hebrew. Looking upon the face of God was the very purpose of a temple, as Yahweh makes clear in the ancient Greek translation of the book of Exodus: ‘You shall make me a sanctuary and I shall be seen among you’ (Exodus 25.8).

Written into the Torah, the command to see Yahweh’s face was a formalized reflection of the deity’s long-held desire to be seen. ‘Seek my face!’ he called to his worshippers. ‘Come before his countenance!’ his ritual singers urged ( 1 Chronicles 16.11; 2 Chronicles 7.14; Hosea 5.15; Psalms 27.8; 100.2; 105.4. See also Andreas Wagner (trans. Marion Salzmann), God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament (London: T&T Clark, 2019), pp. 126–29). In one psalm, worshippers who ‘ascend the hill of Yahweh’ and ‘stand in his sacred standing-place’ will receive blessings as they behold the deity’s face (Psalm 24.3–6). According to the book of Deuteronomy, the Israelites heard God’s voice, but were unable to see his body (Deuteronomy 4.12). In the Gospel of John, the narrator insists that ‘No one has ever seen God’, while the writer of 1 Timothy claims that ‘God dwells in unapproachable light and no one has ever seen him or can see him!’. And yet several characters in the Bible – including Moses himself – do indeed see God’s face and live to tell the tale. These biblical inconsistencies likely derive from competing religious traditions about the extent to which Yahweh might render himself visible to mortals beyond the bounds of his temples. Across the ancient world, deities were understood to be innately dangerous, particularly when they were on the move. Whether betwixt and between temples, or the heavens and the earth, or the city and the wilderness, divine behaviour was far more unpredictable in liminal space.

The God of the Bible was similarly accustomed to obscuring his face in an effort to sever relationships with his own worshippers. In language conjuring an image of the deity covering his face with his hands, Yahweh is said to hide his face from those he once cared for, and now rejects: ‘When you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things; when you conceal your face, they are dismayed’ (Psalm 104.28–29). Dismayed – and cursed. In obscuring his own face, Yahweh exposes unworthy worshippers to the predations of malevolent beings: ‘I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured; many evil troubles will find them’ (Deuteronomy 31.17). ‘They will cry to Yahweh, but he will not answer them; he will hide his face from them at that time, for they have acted wickedly’ (Micah 3.4). ‘You have wrapped yourself with a cloud, so that no prayer can pass through’, sobs personified Jerusalem as she laments her destruction at the hands of the Babylonians (Lamentations 3.44). ‘Your sins have become barriers between you and your god’, cries a prophet among the exiles in Babylon; ‘your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he does not hear’ (Isaiah 59.2).

Horns

El was frequently titled ‘Bull’, and he quite naturally expected his divine children to inherit his horns of divinity. God himself is not only portrayed as the divine Bull, equipped with horns, but fully expects his own progeny to inherit them (Nicolas Wyatt, ‘Bull El and his Avatars: The Iron Age Legacy of an Ugaritian Trope’, in Carole Roche-Hawley and Robert Hawley (eds.), Mélanges européennes en l’honneur de Dennis Pardee (Louvain: Peeters, forthcoming). It is an image applied to the tribe of Joseph in an ancient poem, in which God’s divine blessings rain down on his ‘son’ (Deuteronomy 33.16–17). God’s horns were remembered not only in ancient poems, but in the rituals and iconography of his temples, too. The prophet Zedekiah ben Chenaanah is said to have crafted a pair of iron horns to enact Yahweh’s promise to the kings of Israel and Judah that the neighbouring Aramaeans would be gored to death in battle (1 Kings 22.11)

But in some of Yahweh’s temples, the deity was not simply crowned with heavenly horns, but took the form of a divine bull. According to the books of Kings, Yahweh’s temples in Bethel and Dan were each said to have housed a golden statue of a young bull-god, while in the book of Hosea, a gold and silver statue of a bull was said to have been worshipped in Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel. Despite his exasperated critique of worshippers fawning over the statue, the prophet can barely disguise the clear implication that it manifested the city’s patron deity, Yahweh of Samaria himself (Hosea 8.1–6; cf. 10.5). For the statues at Bethel and Dan, see 1 Kings 12.27–29. Described in these texts as ‘calves’, scholars widely understand them to be divine bull images. See Lewis, The Origin and Character of God, pp. 317–33.

Desiring the Divine

‘One thing I asked of Yahweh, that I will seek ever after: to live in the house of Yahweh all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of Yahweh . . . your face, Yahweh, I do seek!’ (Psalm 27.4, 8). ‘Praise Yah, for Yahweh is good-looking!’ yet another exclaims (Psalms 135.3; 147.1). And yet the Hebrew terms used in these psalms – tob and na‘im – carry with them a strong sense of the aesthetic, and they are often used to describe attractive people, pretty places and wondrous sights, rather than abstract qualities (James Alfred Loader, ‘What do the Heavens Declare? On the Old Testament Motif of God’s Beauty in Creation’, in HTS Theological Studies 67(3), 2011, article 1098; Athalya Brenner, The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 43–51; Luke Ferretter, ‘The Power and the Glory: The Aesthetics of the Hebrew Bible’, in Literature & Theology 18(2), 2004, pp. 123–38; David Penchansky, ‘Beauty, Power, and Attraction: Aesthetics and the Hebrew Bible’, in Richard J. Bautch and Jean-François Racine (eds.), Beauty and the Bible: Toward a Hermeneutics of Biblical Aesthetics (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 47–68). YHWH may well have embodied praiseworthy values, but he was also staggeringly beautiful.