God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. Picador (London 2021). Hbk. 608 pages. £11.
This is a big book, as perhaps befits its subject. But it is not the book you might expect on the subject of God. From the outset its author makes clear she has no interest in metaphysics or theology, the usual metrics for the discussion of this subject; she also has no religious belief. Rather, Francesca Stavrakopoulou (FS), Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter, is interested in the cultural manifestations of the powerful individuals that dominated the societies of Ancient South-West Asia. (Trigger warning: in these post-colonial times we must apparently no longer use the Eurocentric term ‘Ancient Near East’.)
In her pursuit of these supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking individuals with supra-human power, FS declares her intention of ‘stripping away the theological veneer of centuries of Jewish and Christian piety,’ so as to disentangle him, ‘from his scriptural and doctrinal fetters to reveal a deity wholly unlike the God worshipped by Jews and Christian today.’ Her operational plan of dissection is rather clinical, like an autopsy dividing her subject in to five sections: Feet and Legs; Genitals; Torso: Arms and Hands; Head. No prizes for guessing which may be of most interest!
Her anatomy, which is also very well illustrated, covers not only subjects from the ancient world but reaches into the Christian centuries. Of interest is the early iconography of Jesus that in the early centuries shows a clean shaven short haired, simply dressed figure. This changes rather dramatically by the fourth century to reveal the bearded, magisterial figure that has remained normative ever since.
FS mentions Greek thinker Xenophanes of Colophon who, at the outset of the fifth century BCE, remarked on the human tendency to make gods in their own image: ‘The Ethiopians say their gods are broad-nosed and dark skinned, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.’ From more recent research from the University of North Carolina (2018) about such cultural preferences and cognitive bias that she quotes, it seems little has changed.
As she roves across the biblical world of Ancient South-West Asia, FS reveals a vast amount of fascinating information that amply fills up her five anatomical sections. However, one central figure that comes to dominate the narrative is Yahweh, one of the seventy sons of the Canaanite high-god, El. Yahweh is a minor storm deity, who is also a predatory alpha-male with attitude, determined to make a name for himself. And how! For this is the figure that we have now come to know as ‘God’.
FS explores from his early background and portrayal, such as on the ostracon from Kuntilett’ Ajrjud site in the Sinai peninsula – though I missed the most graphic image of Yahweh proudly displaying his well-endowed genitalia in the company of his wife (Ashtoreth) – to his evolution in the pages of the bible as a refined and supreme ethical being.
But, old habits die hard. FS notes that, ‘In the Bible, however, God’s most significant relationship is not with a goddess or goddess-like figure, but with his other wife, Israel.’ Here she quotes the vivid example from Hosea where Israel is presented as a capricious teenager and God as a powerful sexual predator, who vows to seduce her, to ‘take her walking into the wilderness and speak to her heart…and there she will cry out.’ (Hosea 2:14-15) Here the language of the love-struck deity shifts from passion to threat and the Hebrew expression used is that for the rape of captive women. The comment of FS is instructive: ‘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.’
Encapsulated in this ancient narrative is a seminal element of Western civilisation’s patriarchal order of male entitlement and ‘the way things are’, or have always been among the cultures of the three monotheistic religions. The anatomy of our cultural DNA stretches back millennia into the mists of time and nothing much seems to have changed. Those ancient cultural representations are perhaps not so ancient after all.