16. Gazzada

Amy Allan (NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community), The God Who Sees and Hears: Indigenous Insights on Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness

Nazeer Bacchus (New York University), Ritual Assemblage: Holy Vessels, Divine Agency, and Sacred Space in the Priestly Religious Imagination

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), Idolizing Moses: The Embodiment of YHWH?

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.

Daniel Glover (Lee University), Between Spirit and Flesh: Ancient Cosmology, Divine Embodiment, and God’s Holy Pneuma in Luke/Acts

Charles Halton (St. Mary’s University, Twickenham), Divine Embodiment and Dialetheism: Truth, Contradiction and Metaphor in Ancient Israel

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 B Hundley (University of Memphis), Fantastic Bodies and Where to Find Them in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East

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.

Jutta Jokiranta (University of Helsinki), Meeting with God: Come Closer!

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), Stoics and Epicureans on God’s Body and their Influence on Pre-Nicene Christian Theologies

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.

Dan McClellan (Independent Scholar), Divine Image and Divine Name: The Cognitive Roots of Jesus’ Manifestation of God’s Presence

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.

Anathea Portier-Young (Duke Divinity), Between the Throne and the Cross: Artistic and Bodily Mediations of Divine Encounter in the Saint John’s Bible Prophets Volume

Benjamin Sommer (Jewish Theological Seminary), The Bodies in Genesis and the Genesis of Bodies: An Alternate Model for Research and Writing in the Humanities

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