These are texts that took shape only a few centuries before the beginning of the Christian era; the chronological gap between them and the most abundant collection of mythical writings about El and Ba’al is larger than that between Homer and Sophocles. It seems strange to say that the “real” god of the Hebrew Bible is to be identified simply with the most archaic aspect of the text. None of the final editors of the Hebrew scriptures is committed to any theory about the non-material nature of their deity. But in the three or four centuries before the Christian era the divine body is increasingly understood by Jewish writers as drastically unlike our own, invisibly filling or containing all finite space, constituted of (or at least manifest in) fire or light. It is not circumscribed as ordinary matter is, and so apparently contradictory things may be said about it. [Francesca] Stavrakopoulou is right to underline that this is still a good way from the resolute insistence of later theology and philosophy on God’s immateriality, from the first Christian century onwards, but it is part of the long process by which that concept finds its way into the Jewish and Christian thought-world. […]
This connects with a question raised by Stavrakopoulou’s closing pages [in God: An Anatomy]. She takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine. But – apart from the fact that in Holbein’s lifetime the glory of the human form as representing divinity was being reaffirmed by artists in southern Europe as never before – the point of a picture like this, or of any other representation of the torment and suffering of Jesus, was to say that “the divine” does not shrink from or abandon the human body when it is humiliated and tortured.
In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off.