16. Gazzada 2025

Amy N. Allan, NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community

Title: The God Who Sees and Hears: Indigenous Insights on Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness

Abstract:
In the parallel legends of Hagar and Ishmael’s interactions with Yhwh/Elohim (the God of the Hebrew Bible) in Genesis 16:1–16 and 21:8–21, the Divine Being’s seeing and hearing are experienced in the wilderness (מדבר). Though the Pentateuch frequently associates the wilderness with hardship or punishment (Gen 37:12–36; Ex 16; 17:1–7; Num 14:20–38; 27:12– 23; 32:13; Deut 8:1–3), it also signifies the wilderness as a unique location of divine encounter (Ex 3; Num 13:17–22; 32:13–14; Deut 2; 32:10). It is significant that the climactic moments of these two stories of Hagar and Ishmael occur in the wilderness and combine these themes of hardship, punishment, and divine encounter. Of interest, several wordplays weave divine seeing and hearing throughout these narratives, such as (1) Abram granting Sarai permission to treat Hagar as seemed “good to Sarai’s eyes” in Gen 16:6, which is followed by Hagar naming the Divine as the God Who Sees in Gen 16:13; and (2) the naming of the disregarded first son, Ishmael, as “Yhwh hears” in Gen 16:11, together with the later comment that Elohim hears the voice of the unnamed boy (ַוישׁמע אלהים את־קול הנער) in Gen 21:17 (Brett, 2000; Gunkel, 1997). Might the ancient story of a slave and the child she bore of her master, who endure the extreme hardship of barren land, suggest that Yhwh/Elohim has a body with eyes and ears? From a Native American perspective, wilderness is not a landscape “untrammeled by man” as defined in the 1964 Wilderness Act, but rather a place of sacred importance and significant connection with the Divine, nature, our animal relatives, and humanity (Deloria Jr., 1999; Briggs-Cloud, 2015; McKay, 1996). With the Indigenous perspective that nature is the primary place for divine-human encounters, the wilderness in Genesis 16 and 21 not only quiets the distraught outcasts, it also sets the stage for God’s own concrete senses of hearing and seeing to wake up and take notice of those in distress. This paper will explore the wilderness’ role in arousing God’s watching and listening presence (not simply disembodied divine awareness) as a presentation of divine embodiment in the Hagar and Ishmael narratives of Genesis 16:1–16 and 21:8–21 through the lens of an Indigenous hermeneutic.

 

Nazeer Bacchus, New York University

Title: Ritual Assemblage: Holy Vessels, Divine Agency, and Sacred Space in the Priestly Religious Imagination

Abstract:

The dominant narratives of Israelite and Jewish monotheism are rooted in biblical prohibitions against, and even hostility towards, the making and worshiping of images. These narratives have consequently reinforced the belief in the incorporeality, invisibility, and total transcendence of Israel’s God. However, recent scholarship in biblical studies has challenged these once-axiomatic claims through broader engagement with theories of embodiment, sensory experience, and materiality. Extending these efforts, this paper re-examines the literary representation of ritual furniture in the Priestly account of the wilderness sanctuary (Lev 16; Num 4). It argues that its authors conceptualize divine presence as “sticky,” and that ritual objects acquire a trace of this presence through proximity and contact with the deity. Accordingly, I propose that these objects take on the role of “distributive agents” of divine presence, materializing the sacred as an active and visually-affective experience without fully substituting for the deity or reducing his presence to those objects. To demonstrate these metaphysical claims, I pay special attention to the transmutation of Moses’ face (Exod 34:29-35), arguing that his skin is not only affected through contact with Yahweh but also transformed into a ritualized object within the Priestly story-world. Ultimately, this paper seeks to illustrate how the priestly writers develop specific claims of Yahweh’s corporeal and visible body through the ontological properties of visual and material objects. It aims to reveal how those claims are not secondary to the formation of sacred space but actively shapes the ritualized conditions under which the divine is experienced, suggesting that the interplay between the materiality, visuality, and the sacred is foundational to Israelite religious imagination.

 

Amy Balogh, Regis University

Title: Idolizing Moses: The Embodiment of YHWH?

Abstract:

How does Moses come to have such a peculiar relationship with YHWH and does it go so far as for Moses to embody the deity? This paper answers this question with a resounding “yes” and focuses on how Moses comes to embody YHWH. To understand Moses’ status change from one who hid his face before God (Exod 3:6) to one who stood “face to face” with him on a regular basis (e.g., 33:11; 34:34), I look not only to the biblical text but eastward to ancient Mesopotamia, where the Mis Pi (Washing of the Mouth) ritual was used for over two thousand years to induct idols into divine service. The Mis Pi ritual is suggestive for understanding the key moment when YHWH transitions Moses from “uncircumcised of lips” (6:30) to “god to Pharaoh” (7:1), and opens up a new way to understand other difficult traditions about Moses as well, including his famous horned or luminous visage (34:29-35) and incomparable intimacy with YHWH (e.g., Num 12:6-8, Deut 34:1-8). The result of this comparison is a new reading of Moses in his role as mediator between divine and human realms, one which illuminates his struggle for transformation, the unique nature of his existence, and his peculiar relationship with the deity he embodies.

 

Giovanni Battista Bazzana, Harvard Divinity School

Title: Paul Leaving Corinth: Traces of a Possession Ritual in Acts of Paul 12

Abstract:

Acts of Paul 12 has preserved, in an episode located in Corinth before Paul’s departure for Rome, one of the very few accounts of a possession ritual within the earliest Christ groups. The present paper has reexamined this episode, arguing that it provides some crucial elements for a historical and religious evaluation of the role played by possession within these groups. As attested cross-culturally through ethnographic fieldworks, possession is not only a “negative” phenomenon, but it performs also a number of beneficial cultural “works” both for individuals and for their groups. In the case of ActPl 12, it becomes a means through which the Corinthian group reflects on the traumatic experience of Paul’s departure for Rome and to the prophecy of his imminent death.

 

 Deborah Forger, University of Michigan

Abstract:

To talk about God’s body or its close corollary, a divine embodiment, is to address the question of what we mean by the very notion of “body” itself. The topic of the body has seen an explosion of scholarly attention in recent years prompting scholars to ask why bodies are so ubiquitous within the scholarly narrative yet are at the same time so difficult to pin down. As a test case, this paper draws upon recent scholarly discussions of ‘God’s body’ and places those in conversation with the Gospel of John’s depiction of Jesus as the unique embodiment of Israel’s God. I begin by showing how even though within the ancient Jewish imagination the forms that God’s body took were not monolithic, that many ancients envisioned God with a body is significant because in antiquity persons sought to know God not only intellectually, but also corporeally. That is to say, people employed their bodies and senses to connect with God. I then show how the Johannine evangelist participates in these ancient Jewish understandings of what constitutes a divine body but then maps those tropes exclusively on the figure of Jesus. I conclude by suggesting that greater clarity about what how Jesus’s first-century body relates to other ancient conceptions of what constitutes a divine body obliges an investigation of how other Jews living in the centuries just before and after the start of the Common Era conceived of God’s various bodily forms.

 

Charles A. Gieschen, Concordia Theological Seminary

Title: Understanding the Pauline Body of Christ in Light of Jewish Traditions about God’s Visible Form

Abstract:

The Pauline Epistles contain significant testimony that the risen Christ has a mystical “body” of which he is the “head” (e.g., 1 Cor 12:12–13; Rom 12:4–5; Gal 3:28; Eph 1:17–23; 4:15–16; Col 1:18). These epistles also contain testimony about the eternal Son as the Glory, the Image, and the Form of God (e.g., 2 Cor 3:17–4:6; Phil 2:5–11; Col 1:15). This paper will demonstrate that Second Temple Jewish mystical traditions about the visible form of God are the basis for this Pauline Christology, including the conception of the church as the mystical body of Christ.

 

Daniel B. Glover, Lee University

Title: “Between Spirit and Flesh: Ancient Cosmology, Divine Embodiment, and God’s Holy Pneuma in Luke/Acts”

Abstract:

In Acts 2, Luke presents the outpouring of God’s pneuma as the fulfilment of Joel’s prophecy that God’s spirit would be poured on all flesh. At first glance, this seems to suggest that the pneuma is an unembodied substance filling embodied containers (“all flesh”). However, at Jesus’s baptism, Luke already describes the pneuma as embodied (σωματικῷ, Luke 3:21) before Jesus is “filled” with it (πλήρης, 4:1). This essay inquires after the conceptual backgrounds available to explain an embodied divine pneuma, finding an answer among popular Hellenistic philosophy. It then examines how Luke’s ancient Mediterranean audience could interpret the dispersion of the pneuma poured out upon “all flesh.” Directing attention again to Hellenistic philosophy, it argues that sharing in the divine pneuma was imagined as the extension of divine identity. Those filled with the pneuma, then, become loci of the divine presence, which illustrated through analysis of two key texts (Acts 5:15–16 and 19:12).

 

Matheus Grillo R. de Carvalho, McGill University

Title: Bodies Tell Stories: YHWH as an Oath Performer in Jewish Literature from the First Millennium BCE to the Second Century CE

Abstract: Bodies tell stories, encapsulating experiences of trauma, healing, and identity. But what about God? Does He have a body? While contemporary Western thought often conceptualizes God as non-corporeal, ancient religious texts frequently portray deities, including YHWH, as tangible beings. Scholars have identified a transition from corporeal to non-corporeal representations of the divine in Jewish literature; however, this shift has not been systematically examined. This presentation explores YHWH’s role as an oath performer in ancient Jewish literature from the first millennium BCE to the second century CE, building on Mark Smith’s (2001) proposition that ritualized behaviors emphasize divine corporeality. By analyzing variations in this motif across different texts sharing the same cultural milieu, I argue that these portrayals reflect broader cultural transformations—such as increased textualization, the rise of literary expertise, and changing colonial contexts in the Eastern Mediterranean. This research enhances our understanding of ancient Jewish discourses as historical artifacts and illuminates the complex relationship between ritual practices and superempirical entities in the evolving landscape of ancient Jewish religion.

 

Jennie Grillo, Notre Dame University

Title: Body Language: Bone and Flesh and God in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract: It is often noted that while the Hebrew Bible speaks of a number of divine body parts – eyes, ear, hand, feet, face, and so on – it never speaks of God having bones, flesh, or blood, and in fact sometimes insists that he does not. This paper will consider whether this divine lack of flesh should alter the ways we speak about the biblical God as ‘having a body’. Two sets of language use are the relevant contexts for such an inquiry: the language of ‘body/embodiment’ in the wider humanities, and the ways in which biblical Hebrew uses particular terms, especially basar, in relation to what English designates as ‘body’.

 

Robert G. Hall, Hampden-Sydney College

Title: “Divine Embodiment”: Natural and Unsurprising in Ascension of Isaiah

Abstract:

The Ascension of Isaiah envisions a world in which the “embodiment” of the Beloved’s highest glory as a human being is absolutely unsurprising and natural: as perfectly in accord with what it means to be human as with what it means to be God.

 

Charles Halton, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham

Title: Divine Embodiment and Dialetheism: Truth, Contradiction and Metaphor in Ancient Israel

Abstract:

The Law of Non-Contradiction has been assumed in virtually all Western intellectual conversation since Aristotle asserted that it is “the most certain of all principles” (Metaphysics 4:1005b24). Editors of the Hebrew Bible do not seem to share this assumption. Instead, they appear to embrace a dialetheic approach. One of the clearest examples of this is the way they conceived of God’s embodiment. Even though there may be variation within particular authorial strands, the Hebrew Bible as a whole imagines that God both is and is not restricted to a particular place at a particular time. Since God’s embodiment was seen in dialetheic terms, scholars should not regard so-called “anthropomorphic” descriptions of God as metaphors, but as full-fledged truth statements that contain within them their negation.

 

Michael Hundley, University of Memphis

Title: Fantastic Bodies and Where to Find Them in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East

Abstract:

In certain texts from the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East, both gods and monsters have fantastically transgressive bodies, while in iconography generally only monsters violate cognitive categories. With an assist from cognitive science, this presentation explores the genres and contexts of fantastic superhuman bodies with a view toward better understanding their varied uses.

 

Luke Irwin, Covenant College

Title: Divine Corporeality and the Perfections of Transcendence

Abstract:

The terms “transcendence” and “transcendent” are not predicated of God in the New Testament. Most scholars appear to use the term(s) to describe how God surpasses the world and thereby indicate how he relates to it. Given the varying and potentially contradictory accounts of God in the primary texts, it remains unclear what scholars mean, which invites questions about what divine “transcendence” entails. While Early Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and Early Christian writers extol God for his greatness and power – qualities that fall under modern theological rubrics of “transcendence” – these authors possess numerous and contradictory ways of doing so. Some present God as a massive and radiant celestial being, embodied in ways that defy human imagining while others insist that God is metaphysically “simple:” infinite and unchangeable because he is immaterial, incorporeal, and beyond comprehension. The primary texts thus offer multiple accounts of how God is “greater than” yet relates to his creation. By contrast, current scholarly discussions run the risk of curtailing their findings by invoking assumptions about God that may obscure the nuance of the texts. Such ambiguity stems from a lack of sustained study of “transcendence” in New Testament scholarship, despite the proliferation of scholarly interest in who God is and how he interacts with the world. As scholarship on divine embodiment increases, the discipline finds itself at a crossroads: multiple accounts of transcendence exist but remain uncollated, their points of continuity and discontinuity unexamined. This essay will begin to address the problem by offering an account of the term itself and asking whether its predication of God in scholarly literature should be qualified and how. Drawing from the work of John Barclay, it will argue that divine “transcendence” admits of scholarly “perfections,” which may or may not be applicable to the God described in the New Testament. However, one need not abolish the category. By refining their comparative efforts, scholars can begin to ask whether Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and Christian texts can each speak of a “transcendent” God in variegated ways, however much their theologies diverge or align.

 

Jutta Jokiranta, University of Helsinki

Title: Meeting with God: Come Closer!

Abstract: The Dead Sea Scrolls testify to common idiomatic depictions of God, allowing human imagination to grasp a being very similar to humans, with agency located in embodied form. Yet this God is often spoken of in the Scrolls also in fairly abstract terms. This paper argues that the Scrolls do not tell us what kind of God the ancient people believed in or formed relations with but rather helps us to analyze for which purposes God is spoken of in human terms or seen to extend to the environment or various mediators. Psychological experience is an egocentric phenomenon. If an object to be represented is more distant (psychologically, physically, socially or hypothetically) from the self, its mental construal becomes more abstract (i.e. high-level construal). If it is closer to the self, the mental construal becomes more concrete (i.e. low-level construal). This paper suggests that side by side the fairly abstract, ideal notions of righteous and morally superior and thus distant God, existed the ritual world meant to facilitate encountering God.

 

Christoph Markschies, Humboldt University of Berlin

Title: Stoics and Epicureans on God’s Body and their Influence on Pre-Nicene Christian Theologies

Abstract:

Thanks to my own further work on the Pap. Herc. 1055 and further publications of Epicurean and Stoic writings and commentaries, the views developed in my book ‘God’s Body’ (2016; English 2019) can be confirmed, explained in more detail and expanded. The two Christian theologians who are also considered in the lecture are Tertullian and Melito (or texts attributed to Melito). It is shown by this topic once again that the usual view concentrated on Platonic philosophies reflects the historical development of Christian reflection in Antiquity only one-sidedly and urgently needs to be supplemented.

 

Daniel McClellan, Independent Scholar

Title: Divine Image and Divine Name: The Cognitive Roots of Jesus’ Manifestation of God’s Presence

Abstract:

Authors of early Christian literature appealed to a variety of conceptual frameworks to rationalize the relationship of Jesus to God in ways that could find purchase among the various Greco-Roman Jewish worldviews of the first and early second centuries CE, but they didn’t seem to have to go too far out of their way. Divine mediation is not an uncommon theme in Second Temple Jewish literature, and as with early Christian literature, the divine name frequently plays a central role. The earliest followers of Jesus seemed to have had little trouble accepting that Jesus in some sense manifested God’s presence, and this shares striking similarities with the widespread perception among ancient worshippers that divine images manifested the presence of the deities they indexed. Drawing on insights from the cognitive science of religion, this paper will explore the intuitive logic of divine images as an explanatory framework for the earliest Christians’ perception that Jesus manifested God’s presence.

 

Meira Polliack, Tel Aviv University

Title: Embodying Divine Absence: Joseph’s Mirroring of Hagar’s Wilderness Ordeal

Abstract:

Though the narrative cycles of Abraham and Joseph are very different in style and content, the stories of Hagar and her son (Gen 16; 21:8–21) and Joseph and his brothers (Gen 37; 39) share some striking motifs: both characters are connected to Egypt, both are enslaved by a couple, members from the ‘other’ culture (Abraham and Sarah, Potiphar and his wife), both are rejected by their own and adoptive families, both find themselves wandering in the desert and lose their way.(תעה) The central life experience and psychological trait shared by the characters of Hagar and Joseph is the ‘desolation of rejection’ (to use Phyllis Tribble’s tantalizing title in her Texts of Terror). Moreover, In regard to their common wilderness ordeal both characters are close to death: Hagar searching for a water well for her son in the blazing desert sun (באר) Joseph hoping for rescue at the dark bottom of a waterless pit (בור). Both are cast-outs, literally thrown away to their fate (השליך) while young or bearing the young ((ילד/נער. Yet God’s embodiment in both stories is clearly contrastive: while God’s angel calls out to Hagar, listening to the crying voice of her son (21:18) and God himself opens her eyes to see the water well and save him (20:19), Joseph, on a lost search for his brothers, is met by a man who directs him to his desperate fate at the hands of brothers conniving to kill him, and his begging them for his life is left unheard by his brothers (Gen 42: 21-22) and by God, who never directly or otherwise appears to him in his story. The Ishmaelite descendant people of Hagar and Abraham, however, are involved in Joseph’s rescue from the pit (Gen 28-29). The paper will discuss how these intertextual connections, including the semantic fields of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ (as illuminated in Amy Allan’s paper) and other motifs underlie the theme of God’s absence (or: lack of tangible presence) in the Joseph narrative. Finally, I will try to show how the theme of embodiment of divine absence, as juxtaposed to the theme of the embodiment of divine presence, is reflected in some ancient and medieval reception exegesis of the Joseph narrative.

 

Anathea Portier-Young, Duke University Divinity School

Title: Between the Throne and the Cross: Artistic and Bodily Mediations of Divine Encounter in the Saint John’s Bible Prophets Volume

Abstract:

How might sacred art both represent and mediate embodied experience of encounter with the divine? The St. John’s Bible (TSJB) Prophets volume (2005) invites its viewers not only to visualize God and the future God promises but also to enter sacred spaces of encounter and there meet the God it portrays. The paper surveys five illuminations in TSJB Prophets volume that foreground spatial and bodily mediation of divine encounter: Isaiah’s throne vision (Isa 6), Ezekiel’s visions of the chariot (Ezek 1) and temple (Ezek 40–48), Daniel’s vision of the Human One (Dan 7), and Isaiah’s suffering slave poem (Isa 52:13-53:12). Close analysis of the illuminations in their literary and visual context and in light of art historical and iconographic considerations reveals a dense visual interweaving of sacred text and sacred space with divine and human bodies. In this interweaving, the locus of divine, embodied encounter is expanded to include not only places of glory and beauty, but also places of devastation and oppression. These visually mediated encounters simultaneously mediate a summons to responsive moral agency.

 

Benjamin Sommer, The Jewish Theological Seminary

Title: The Bodies in Genesis and the Genesis of Bodies: An Alternate Model for Research and Writing in the Humanities

Abstract:

If the thesis of my book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, came as a surprise to many readers, then some of the ramifications of that thesis came as an utter shock. I argue in Bodies not simply that the biblical God has a body—that notion is merely the standard notion of ancient Israelite theology—but rather that, according to one set of biblical authors, God has many bodies located in sundry places in the world that God created. These authors, furthermore, regarded God’s personhood as possessing a fluidity that human personhood lacks, so that God could overlap with other beings and split into smaller, localized manifestations, each of which was God but was not all of God. One implication of this thesis about Israelite thought was that the doctrine of the trinity in Christianity is not, as many Jews have long assumed, a Hellenistic-polytheistic imposition onto an Israelite-monotheistic substratum. Rather, the theological intuition underlying the belief in a triune God is entirely native to ancient Israel and emerges from the Hebrew scriptures themselves. I fully understand the discomfiture my conclusions occasioned among more than a few Jewish readers, since I was the first Jewish scholar who experienced it. How, one may wonder, did a rather traditionalist Jewish scholar arrive at these conclusions? In my presentation at the conference, I would like to share the narrative of my book’s genesis and its development over the decade I worked on it. In many ways my route into the topic and my journey as it unfolded was an uncommon one for a contemporary scholar of the humanities—I might event say, an aberrant one. But I think that the book’s success among readers within the academy and beyond it resulted from its unusual origin. The approach I took in researching and completing this project goes against the grain of most contemporary academic writing in the humanities, but I would like to suggest that it offers a way out of the intellectual impasse that humanistic scholarship has created for itself as well as an escape from the obloquy that our branch of the academy has too often earned.

 

Logan Williams, University of Aberdeen

Title: Becoming the Adamic Body of God: The Theanthropic Kavod and the Hymns for the Exalted Maskil

Abstract:

In the so-called Self-Glorification Hymn(s) scattered throughout the fragmentary Hodayot manuscripts, the speaker attributes to himself a shockingly exalted status, as he speaks phrases such as “Who is like me among the gods (מי כמוני באלים)?” and “None compares to my glory ([לכבודי] לא ידמה).” These expressions draw from language utilised in the Tanakh to praise the incomparable nature of the God of Israel (Exod. 15:11; Is. 40:25) while applying them to the speaker. Scrolls scholars are moving towards the consensus that the speaker is a human, with a few—rightly, in my view—identifying the speaker as a (or the) Maskil(im). But this raises a crucial question: Why can the Maskil speak of himself in terms which the Tanakh uses to articulate the uniqueness of the One God? This paper argues that the theological framework undergirding the Hodayot “Self-Glorification Hymn(s)”—which I will call Hymns for the Exalted Maskil—is an assumed conflation between the adamic body of Genesis 1.26–28 and the divine kavod of Ezekiel 1.26¬–28. Whereas Genesis 1.26 says that humanity is made “according to the likeness (כדמות)” of God, Ezekiel 1.26 speaks of God’s body as “a likeness like the appearance of a human (דמות כמארה אדם),” which is then glossed as “the likeness of the glory of Adonai (דמות כבוד יהוה)”. These similar expressions led to an exegetical trope in which the adamic body is identified with the divine kavod (4Q504 frg. 8r3). A few scrolls construe this motif eschatologically, with the recurring assertion that the righteous will possess “all the glory of Adam” (CD III 20; 1QS IV 23; 1QHᵃ IV 27). Understood in light of Ezekiel’s vision of the enthroned deity, these scrolls do not merely predict that certain humans will possess a divine body; rather they claim that the righteous will both attain Adam’s former glory and be integrated into the glorious, enthroned body of God from Ezekiel 1. I suggest that the Hymns for the Exalted Maskil are spoken from the perspective of one for whom this eschatological prediction has become a reality. To the extent that the Maskil has already been integrated into the divine body and therefore shares in the unique glory of the One God, any statements of incomparability and exaltation applied to God also rightfully apply to him. These texts thus not only construe the divine body in human terms but also portray it as porous and shareable, and this conviction is a crucial feature of the eschatology of the Hodayot and other scrolls.

 

Brittany E. Wilson, Duke University Divinity School

Title: Thinking with the Body: Defining Divine Embodiment in Biblical Texts

Abstract:

Confusion can quickly arise when biblical scholars talk about “God’s body” because scholars do not always use this phrase in the same way. At the heart of the confusion is the term “body” itself, for biblical scholars define what constitutes a “body” differently, if they define it at all. In this paper, I will discuss ancient understandings of the body and how these understandings relate to portrayals of divine bodies. I will also discuss how biblical texts use the human body as a means by which to depict God and how their depiction of God’s instantiations in creation can expand how we understand divine embodiment in the first place. In the end, I will conclude that while clear definitions of the body largely lie in the eye of the beholder, “the body” itself is ultimately a helpful heuristic for understanding biblical portrayals of God and God’s relationship with the material world.