Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

[dastardly stem]

Letting her speak for herself again:

21 An Autopsy

The Bible is bunkum. Its God is dead. At least, that’s what myriad thinkers and writers have told us. Since the Enlightenment, prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination. And yet the God of the Bible looks nothing like the deity dissected and dismissed by modern atheism. The God killed off by the rationalist intellectuals of Western philosophy and science is not to be found in the Bible. Their dead deity is a post-biblical, hybrid being, a disembodied, science-free Artificial Intelligence, assembled over the course of two thousand years from selected scraps of ancient Jewish mysticism, Greek philosophy, Christian doctrine, Protestant iconoclasm and European colonialism. In the contemporary age, this composite being has become a god who forgot to create dinosaurs and failed to account for evolution; a god who allows cancer to kill children, but hates abortion; a god who is everywhere and sees everything, but remains absent and says nothing. But the modern God of the West and the ancient God of the Bible are very different beings.

If it were the corpse of the biblical God laid out on a slab before us, what would we see? A supersized, human-shaped body with male features and shining, ruddy-red skin, tinged with the smell of rainclouds and incense. His broad legs suggest he was accustomed not only to striding, leaping and marching, but sitting and standing resolutely stiff, posing like a ceremonial statue. His biceps bulge. His forearms are as hard as iron. There are faint indentations around his big toes, left by thonged sandals. Beneath his toenails there are traces of human blood, as though he has been trampling on broken bodies, while the remnants of fragrant grass around his ankles suggest strolls through a verdant garden. The slightly lighter tone of the skin on his thighs indicates he was most often clothed, at least down to his knees, if not his ankles. Minute fibres of fine fabric–a costly linen and wool mix–indicate that his clothing was similar to the vestments of high-status priests. His penis is long, thick and carefully circumcised; his testicles are heavy with semen. His stomach is swollen with spiced meat, bread, beer and wine. The chambers of his heart are deep and wide. His fingers are stained with an expensive ink, and there are remnants of clay under his fingernails. On his arms are faint scars left from the grazes of giant fish-scales, and the crooks of his elbows, slightly sticky with a salty oil, bear the imprint of swaddling bands, suggesting he has cradled newborn babies. Traces of the tannery fluid used by hide-workers wind in a stripe around his left arm and down to the palm of his hand–a residual substance left by a long leather tefillin strap.

His thick hair is oiled with a sweet-smelling ointment, and shows evidence of careful styling: the hair-shafts suggest it was once separated and curled into thick ropes, while slight marks on the back of his scalp indicate it has been partly pinned beneath some sort of headgear–and his forehead is marked with the faint impression of a tight band of metal. Although his beard reaches beyond his chin, it has been neatly groomed, while his moustache and eyebrows are thick but tidy. The hair on his head and face shimmers–first dark with blue hues, like lapis lazuli, then white and bright, like fresh snow. In one glance, he has the beard of his aged father, the ancient Levantine god El; in another, it is the stylized beard of a youthful warrior, like the deity Baal. His ears are prominent, and their lobes are pierced. His eyes are thickly lined with kohl. His nose is long, its nostrils broad–the scent of burnt animal flesh and fragrant incense lingers inside them. His lips are full and fleshy, his mouth large and wide. It is at once the mouth of a devourer and a lover. His teeth are strong and sharp, his tongue is red hot. His saliva is charged with a blistering heat. The back of his throat is a vast, airy chamber, once humming with life. Below it is the opening of a cavernous gullet. Shadowy scraps of another powerful being, the dusty underworld king, cling to its walls.

If we were to diagnose a cause of death, we might find the early blows were struck at the end of the eighth century BCE, when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and at the beginning of the sixth century BCE, when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem. With the destruction of Yahweh’s temples came the loss of its sacred objects–including what were probably statues of Yahweh himself.[ 1] In Judah, the fall of Jerusalem marked a decisive rupture in traditional religious practice, from which the body of God would never really recover. By the time the Jerusalem temple had been rebuilt, in the early fifth century BCE, the city was under the religious control of powerful families newly returned from Babylonia, whose own experience had taught them that Yahweh had no need for a cult statue: to them, he was a deity transcending the bounds of temple and homeland–a hidden but powerful presence among his displaced people. Accordingly, some worshippers would come to see material images of the deity as religiously dangerous: in ritual terms, they were evidently vulnerable to displacement, disabling, or destruction, but in broader theological terms, they constrained an increasingly transcendent deity in ways some now found worryingly immobilizing.

In Jerusalem, Yahweh was back in his newly built temple, dining at his altar and inhaling the sweet scent of sacrifice and incense, but he was increasingly cast as an unseen presence, mysteriously shrouded from view behind a smoky screen of sacrifice and the impenetrable darkness of sacred space in the holy of holies. It is at this point that the explicit prohibition of images of Yahweh or any other divine being within his downsized retinue appears to have found its way into the Ten Commandments: ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image’.[ 2] Instead, the Torah itself–the written word of God–would take the place of a cult statue.

But although Yahweh’s body was no longer to be seen, it did not vanish altogether. During this Second Temple period, material images of deities would become increasingly reviled precisely because their bodies were not like Yahweh’s: their feet were immovable, their eyes blind, their ears deaf and their mouths mute, while their nostrils could neither smell nor breathe. Yahweh’s body, of course, functioned perfectly well. He was hidden, but he was far from disembodied. Instead, God became ever more transcendent. The Jerusalem temple had once been the meeting place of heaven and earth. Now, heaven would begin to stretch away, further from the world, taking the deity deeper into its highest heights, leaving only God’s Torah, his inscribed ‘name’, or increasingly ephemeral traces of his ‘holiness’ and ‘glory’, in residence. The temple would no longer be the dwelling place of God, but an earthly reflection of his far-off heavenly home. From now on, only seers and mystics who travelled to the heavens in a rapturous daze were able to catch a glimpse of his form. To them, God’s corporeality became increasingly, gigantically cosmic: it bore the semblance of a human shape, but it projected bright light, fire, noise and wind so spectacular that, even in the heavens, it was almost impossible to comprehend it. For some, God’s body was simply too overwhelming to behold. For others, it would become mysteriously invisible.

I meant to continue posting snippets for consideration. I doubt many are considering it here, but it's fun. Great book. Worth considering, I'd say.