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God: An Anatomy
Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Picador 2021
Hb, 608pp, £25, ISBN 9781509867332
There’s no doubting Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s ambition. In this huge, hugely entertaining, brilliantly written and wholly misconceived book she sets out to show us “the real God of the Bible”. That sort of claim usually comes from pulpits in Alabama, and it’s met by scholars saying, wearily (and as Stavrakopoulou knows very well) that the Bible isn’t one seamless book, but was composed by many people over many ages, that it contains many different literary genres and many different perspectives on who God is and how he, she or it relates to human beings.
The thesis is straightforward: we make God in our own image. We have bodies, and so does He. We weep, talk, sleep, sulk, feel, fight, love, lose and triumph, and so does He. So far so good. It’s a contentious idea, but an arguable one. But Stavrakopoulou adopts a curious way of trying to convince us. She embarks on a systematic audit of the way that God’s body is described in the biblical texts and in many of the other ancient south-west Asian traditions (she rightly rejects as Eurocentric the term “Near Eastern”) from which the biblical authors borrowed or against which they reacted.
There’s plenty of material, of course. God walks (presumably on feet) in the cool of the Eden evening, uses those feet to crush his enemies, has a strong hand and an outstretched arm, hides and occasionally shows his face, and the Talmud insists that because Adam was circumcised (though the Bible is silent about that) God, in whose image Adam was made, must have been circumcised too. Asherah was Yahweh’s consort, though the liaison was hushed up by the Hebrew Bible, and she was unabashedly sexual, holding open her labia in late Bronze Age depictions. Isaiah’s vision of
