And so the high god makes the very first human: ‘God created the human in his image, in the image of God he created him’. The new creature – adam, meaning ‘man’ or ‘human’ – bears a bodily resemblance to his divine creator, and is swiftly paired with a female version: ‘male and female he created them’. In academic circles, there is nothing particularly contentious about this paraphrase of the opening chapter of the book of Genesis. Most biblical scholars would agree that when God says, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness’, he is addressing the other members of the ‘divine assembly’ – the biblical label given to God’s council of lower-ranking deities and divine beings. And most would agree (even if some might squirm a little) that in being made in the image and likeness of the gods, freshly minted humans bear a visual resemblance to their own deities, just as Adam’s son Seth is later said to be the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of his father, and in other biblical texts, divine statues are the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of the gods they represent. See Genesis 1.26–27; 5.1, 3; 9.6; Numbers 33.52; 2 Kings 11.18; Isaiah 40.18–20. Here, the key Hebrew terms are tselem (‘image’) and demut (‘likeness’). For further discussion, see Stephen L. Herring, Divine Substitution: Humanity as the Manifestation of Deity in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), especially pp. 96–127; Anne K. Knafl, Forming God: Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), pp. 53–67; Catherine L. McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5–3:24 in Light of the mīs pî pīt pî and wpt-r Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015), pp. 117–77.

1. Instead, he was just like any other deity in the ancient world. He had a head, hair and a face; eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth. He had arms, hands, legs and feet, and a chest and a back. He was equipped with a heart, a tongue, teeth and genitals. He was a god who breathed, in and out. This was a deity who not only looked like a human – albeit on a far more impressive, glamourous scale – but who very often behaved like a human. He enjoyed evening strolls and hearty meals; he listened to music, wrote books and made lists. He was a god who not only spoke, but whistled, laughed, shouted, wept and talked to himself. He was a god who fell in love and into fights; a god who squabbled with his worshippers and grappled with his enemies; a god who made friends, raised children, took wives and had sex.
2. God’s body is nowhere denied in the Bible. It is simply assumed – whether or not mortals were privileged enough to catch a glimpse of it. And according to biblical texts, many were. Following their exodus from Egypt, a committee of Israelite elders had ascended Mount Sinai and seen first God’s feet, then the deity himself. Among them, of course, was Moses, who is said to have enjoyed regular meetings with God, talking to him ‘face to face, as one would speak to a friend’ (Exodus 24.9–10; 33.11). In Genesis, Abraham walks alongside him, and Jacob has a wrestling match with him. In the books bearing their names, the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel each see God sitting on his throne, while Amos sees him standing in one of his temples. In the Gospels, Jesus not only boasts he has seen God, but is also said to have seated himself alongside God in the heavens, at his right hand. It is a companionable pairing reputedly witnessed by members of the Jesus movement, including a talkative young man called Stephen in the book of Acts, and the enraptured, if terrified, writer of Revelation, known as John of Patmos, both of whom see God sitting enthroned in the heavens, with Christ seated or standing next to him (Genesis 18.1–33; 32.22–30 (cf. Hosea 12.1); Isaiah 6.1–4; Ezekiel 1.1–28; Amos 9.1; Mark 16.19; John 6.46 (cf. John 1.18; 5.36–38); Acts 7.54–56; Revelation 4.1–5.14).

It is a striking insertion, for it suggests that material images of God were once a normative feature of Israelite and Judahite religion – otherwise there would be no need for the ban (Herbert Niehr, ‘In Search of YHWH’s Cult Statue in the First Temple’, in Karel van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), pp. 73–95; Christoph Uehlinger, ‘Anthropomorphic Cult Statuary in Iron Age Palestine and the Search for Yahweh’s Cult Images’, in Karel van der Toorn (ed.), The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), pp. 97–155; Matthias Köckert, ‘Vom Kultbild Jahwes zum Bilderverbot. Oder: Vom Nutzen der Religionsgeschichte für die Theologie’, in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 106(4), 2009, pp. 371–406; Joachim Schaper, Media and Monotheism: Presence, Representation, and Abstraction in Ancient Judah (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), especially pp. 65–70). It was well understood that the gods were usually unobservable in their ‘natural’ heavenly habitat. But they might deign to reveal themselves in the earthly realm as material images in a cult place (a site of worship). More than a symbol or representation, a cult image was a material manifestation of divine presence: the statue was not only identified with the deity, but was the deity.