Two Models of God and the “God of Old”
Abraham Entertaining the Three Angels by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn.
HOW THE GOD DEPICTED IN GENESIS AND OTHER PARTS OF THE BIBLE DIFFERS FROM LATER DEPICTIONS.
Considered from a distance, the Bible actually seems to present two radically different ways of thinking about God.
Let us put aside the story of Abraham for a minute in order to consider a somewhat broader question: what is God like in the Genesis narratives—what sorts of things can He do and know, where is He to be found, and how does He interact with human beings? To ask these questions is to highlight an aspect of the Bible not often discussed, but one that is very important to understanding what the Bible is saying.
There were, in fact, two quite different ways of conceiving of God in biblical times. One way is familiar to us, because it is the later conception of God, the one that was, consequently, passed on to Judaism and Christianity at the end of the biblical period and has been with us in some form ever since. According to this model—and I mean “model” here in the same sense that today’s physicists use the word, that is, a way of trying to conceptualize something that is not directly perceivable by the senses—God is everywhere all at once (that is, He is omnipresent) and, concomitantly, omniscient (He knows everything); indeed, He is also all-powerful (omnipotent). This is the later model; its beginnings are to be located in the sixth century BCE or so, though it does not appear fully until the end of the biblical period.
The earlier model, found in many of the narratives of Genesis and Exodus and Joshua and Judges, as well as in numerous psalms and prophecies and laws, might be defined as everything that the later model is not. That is, earlier biblical texts do not seem to presume that God is everywhere simultaneously. On the contrary, He often goes from one place to another. For example, in the brief narrative of the Tower of Babel examined earlier, God says about the tower builders, “Let us go down and confuse their speech” (Gen. 11:7). This implies that He is not “down” at the time He speaks these words—He is somewhere “up,” presumably in heaven. Similarly, with regard to the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God exclaims, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin is so grievous! I will go down and see if they have indeed gone astray as their cry [indicates], and if not, then I will find that out, too” (Gen. 18:20–21). In fact, this sentence also implies that God is not omniscient either—He hears the sound, but has to go down and check in order to be sure what it means. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve hear God “walking about in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” (Gen. 3:8). Walking is not something you do if you are omnipresent. Even in heaven, according to some biblical texts, God needs a means of transportation: “Behold, the LORD is riding on a swift cloud” (Isa. 19:1); “He rode on a cherub and flew off, He was seen on the wings of the wind” (Ps. 22:11); “Make way for Him who rides upon the clouds” (Ps. 68:4 [5]).1
The Garden of Eden story also seems to presume that God does not necessarily know everything. Thus, as we have seen, after Adam and Eve hide among the trees and bushes of the garden, God calls out, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9); on the face of it, this question implies that He Himself does not know. Similarly, God asks Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” It is only in the next sentence, when He presumably comes closer to Cain and hears “your brother’s blood crying out to Me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10), that God discovers the horrible truth. Later on, God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his beloved son; what would be the point of God conducting such a test if He were all-knowing and thus knew how the test would end before it took place? On the contrary: after it is over, God says to Abraham, “Now I know that you are someone who fears God” (Gen. 22:12)—presumably, before the test, He did not know.
What these texts all imply about God’s finiteness is sometimes put in the most vivid terms: many of these early texts seem to maintain that God has an actual body, a discrete, physical being. True, people do not often see this body, but that is not because the human eye cannot perceive it, but for another reason entirely: to see it is dangerous. So when Moses requests to see God’s “glory,” His physical being, God answers: “No one can see Me and live.” This is not the answer a later theologian might expect—“Sorry, Moses, I have no body for you to see,” or, “You can never see Me because I am invisible—in fact, I am everywhere all at once.” God does indeed have a body in these ancient texts—but because of the danger associated with catching sight of Him, He usually is said to appear surrounded by a protective cloud in order to shield human eyes from the danger. Frequently, He is also said to send a special kind of intermediary, an angel, to pass on His message to human beings.
Because, in this earlier model, God is deemed to have a body, it is no surprise that numerous passages refer to God’s “face,” “hand,” “eyes,” “ears,” “arm,” “fingers,” and so forth. Interpreters have often asserted that these expressions are not to be taken literally, but there is no real basis for this assertion other than the fact that such human body parts did not go well with the interpreters’ own conception of God as bodyless and omnipresent (that is, the second model). Indeed, God’s body in these early texts is not only apparently similar to a human being’s, it is also not much bigger. Thus, God speaks to Moses “face to face, as one man speaks to another” (Exod. 33:11; cf. Deut. 34:10) and “mouth to mouth” (Num. 12:8); at one point He “stands next to” Moses and then “passes in front of him” (Exod. 34:5–6). It is difficult to imagine a huge, cosmic deity—or even one significantly bigger than an ordinary man—doing such things.
These facts are nothing new: scholars and ordinary readers of the Bible have known about them for centuries. But for centuries their real significance was missed. People took such attributions of human traits to God as merely a poor or imperfect representation of what was called above the second, or later, “model” of God in the biblical period. In other words, people thought that if the Bible here and there represents God as finite or humanlike—saying that He has a body and walks, talks, grows angry, is pleased, and so forth—it did not really mean these things. It misrepresented the second model because omnipresence and omniscience were concepts too hard for ordinary people to grasp in biblical times, or because (a somewhat different argument) this was the only sort of language available to them to describe Him.2 But when one considers the matter, this argument actually appears rather weak. Certainly there would be no difficulty in saying in biblical Hebrew, “God is in every place,” “The eye of man cannot see Him,” or the like—and it is hard to imagine that the ordinary biblical Israelite would find such an assertion particularly difficult to grasp. After all, parents who talk to their children about God nowadays usually say such things by the time the child is five or six or seven—with no apparent incomprehension on the child’s part.
With the rise of modern biblical scholarship, an interesting variant on this argument has developed: it is not that biblical authors used anthropomorphisms to get their message across to simple people, but rather that the authors themselves were simple people. They did not have today’s sophisticated understanding of God and so expressed themselves in the concrete, simple terms we know. Or—to put it a little more gently—God relied on the contemporary culture of His “penmen” when He inspired them to write, so that their way of putting things inevitably reflects their own culture’s form of expression.3 This, too, misses the fundamental point. The Bible’s earlier way of representing God is not a poor version of the later way—it is based on a completely different model, a completely different way of conceiving of God’s being, and one that could hardly be described (as many modern scholars imply) as unsophisticated. In some ways, in fact, it is more sophisticated than the later model that replaced it.
Unrecognized Angels
The key to understanding the essence of this earlier model comes from something just mentioned: the fact that, in various stories in Genesis and elsewhere, God sends angels to meet with various human beings. There are a great many such encounters—in the book of Genesis, for example, with Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Jacob, and elsewhere in the Bible with Moses and Balaam and Joshua and so forth. What is striking in all these encounters is that the angel never looks like an angel. Unlike the angels represented in medieval paintings, these biblical angels never have flowing wings or haloes or light that radiates out of their garments—they look exactly like ordinary human beings, at least at first. That is why the biblical account of these meetings always goes to the trouble of narrating a “moment of confusion,” during which the people in question think they are talking to some ordinary person. This confusion goes on for a while, and then somehow, it suddenly dawns on the humans that they are actually talking to an angel, at which time they fall to the ground in reverence. Here is one very brief example from the book of Joshua:
And it came to pass, when Joshua was in Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold! A man was standing across from him with his sword drawn in his hand. So Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you one of us or one of our enemies?” And he answered, “Neither. But I am the chief of the LORD’s army; I have just arrived.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in prostration and said to him, “What does my lord wish to say to his servant?” And the chief of the LORD’s army said to Joshua, “Take your shoe from off your foot, for the place upon which you are standing is holy”—and Joshua did so.
When the “chief of the LORD’s army” (an angel) first appears before Joshua, he looks altogether like an ordinary person—and this apparently makes Joshua a little nervous; after all, people with friendly intentions don’t usually come at you with their swords drawn. On second thought, however, Joshua thinks this man may actually be one of his own troops or some allied fighter—hence his question, “Are you one of us or one of our enemies?” As soon as this angel tells Joshua who he really is, however, Joshua recognizes his mistake at once: he falls down in abject obeisance and waits for further instructions.
A somewhat longer “moment of confusion” occurs in the book of Judges:
There was a certain man from Sore’ah, a Danite by the name of Manoah, whose wife was barren and had borne no children. Now, the angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her: “Though you are barren and have not borne, yet you shall become pregnant and give birth to a son. But you must be careful not to drink wine or strong drink, nor may you eat anything impure. And after your pregnancy, when you give birth to a son, no razor shall touch his head, for the boy will be a nazirite4 of God from the time of his birth . . .” Then the woman went and told her husband, “A man of God [that is, a prophet] came to me, but he looked very frightening, like an angel of God, so I did not ask him where he was from, and he did not tell me his name.”
Then Manoah prayed to the LORD and said: “O my Lord! Let the man of God whom You sent come again to us and instruct us what to do for the boy to be born.” God heeded Manoah’s prayer and the angel of God returned to the woman while she was sitting outside, but her husband Manoah was not with her. So the woman quickly ran back and told her husband and said, “That same man is back who came to me the other time.” Manoah went and followed his wife until he came to the man, and asked him, “Are you the man who spoke with my wife?” and he said, “Yes.” Manoah said, “If what you said is true, then what are we supposed to do with the boy?” The angel of the LORD said to Manoah, “Let your wife be careful about everything I told her . . .” Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, “Permit us to detain you and kill a goat for you[r dinner].” The angel of the LORD said to Manoah, “Though you detain me I will not be able to eat your food; but if you wish to make a burnt offering to the LORD, then send it up”—because Manoah did not realize that he was an angel of the LORD. Then Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, “What is your name? For, when what you said comes true, we will want to honor you.” The angel replied, “Why should you be asking about my name, since it cannot be known?” Then Manoah took the goat and the grain offering, and offered them up to the LORD on a rock, and something wondrous happened while Manoah and his wife were watching: As the flames were rising up from the altar toward the sky, the angel of the LORD rose up in the flames of the altar. When Manoah and his wife saw this, they fell on their faces to the ground.
The angel of the LORD never again appeared to Manoah and his wife; thus, Manoah understood that it was an angel of the LORD. And Manoah said to his wife, “We will surely die, because we have seen God.” But his wife said to him, “If the LORD wanted to kill us, He certainly would not have accepted the burnt offering and grain offering, and He would not have shown us all these things; in fact, He would not let us be hearing this now.” And the woman gave birth to a son and called him Samson.
Here, it is not a moment of confusion but a considerably longer time, perhaps several days. At first, Manoah’s wife (unnamed in the story) thinks her visitor is a “man of God”: this is one of the terms used in the Bible for a prophet, and indeed, it is easy to understand her confusion. After all, she meets someone who appears altogether humanlike, and if he has announced that her barren womb will soon be opened and has further instructed her about preparing her future son to be a “nazirite to God,” she draws the logical conclusion: the person to whom she was speaking must indeed have been some sort of prophet foretelling the future.
Her husband, Manoah, then asks God to send the “man of God” back again, and when he reappears, what Manoah’s wife says only seems to underline the couple’s confusion. “That same man is back who came to me the other time,” she announces, and Manoah then asks him, “Are you the man who spoke with my wife?” Apparently, this God-sent messenger looks very much like an ordinary person (although we are meant to remember the first impression of Manoah’s wife, namely, that the stranger appeared “very frightening, like an angel of God”—he is not altogether ordinary-looking). We, of course, appreciate the irony; the narrator has already said that this is actually an angel, and, as if to stress that fact, the narrator then repeats that it is “the angel of the LORD” whom Manoah invites to share a meal with his wife and himself. But they perceive nothing unusual. Now, it was apparently a well-known fact that angels do not eat or drink, so to the reader/listener, the angel’s response to Manoah’s invitation is altogether comprehensible: I cannot eat the animal you propose to serve me, so perhaps you should offer it as a sacrifice instead. Such a response ought to have tipped off the hospitable couple as well, but it does not. They seem to be in some sort of fog. Instead, they just go ahead as instructed and prepare a sacrifice.
By this point the narrative tension is almost unbearable: We know what is happening, but poor Manoah and his wife are still in the dark. When will they figure it out? Even the angel’s cryptic response to their request to know his name—“Do not ask about my name, since it cannot be known”—does not seem to trigger any response in them; apparently still in a fog, they simply shrug it off and go on with their preparations for the sacrificial offering. It is only when the angel ascends to heaven on the flames of the altar that Manoah and his wife finally understand, and then their reaction is identical to that of Joshua above: they fall down on the ground in prostration.
This is reminiscent of yet another encounter with unrecognized angels, this one bringing us back to the book of Genesis and the story of Abraham. After he has journeyed to the land of Canaan, Abraham settles in Mamre, near Hebron.
The LORD appeared to him [Abraham] at the oak trees of Mamre, as he was sitting near the door of his tent during the hot part of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed to the ground. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you please, do not, I pray, just pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought so that you can wash your feet and rest underneath this tree. Then I will fetch a bit of bread so that you may satisfy your hunger before resuming your journey—after all, you have come this way to your servant’s place.” They replied, “Do just as you have said.”
Then Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah and said: “Quick! Knead three seahs of choice flour and make some loaves.” Next, Abraham ran to the cattle and chose a calf, nice and tender, which he gave to the servant-boy to prepare quickly. After that, he took curds and milk, along with the calf that had been prepared, and set them out before them. Then he stood by under a tree while they ate.
They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” and he answered, “In there, inside the tent.” Then one said, “I will be back this time next year, and your wife Sarah will have a son.” Sarah had been listening at the door of the tent, which was in back of him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, well advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having the periods that women have. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I am all used up will I still have relations—not to mention that my husband is old too!” Then the LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Can I really give birth, old as I am?’ Is anything too much for the LORD? I will be back this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”
In this narrative—unlike the incident with Manoah and his wife—we are not told that Abraham ever really understood who his visitors were. The passage begins by asserting that “the LORD appeared” to Abraham—but this assertion seems to come from the narrator’s point of view. What Abraham sees is “three men standing near him,” and his exaggerated courtesy and zeal in preparing a meal for his unannounced guests seems intended simply to show what a generous host he is—it is no indication that Abraham has somehow figured out his visitors’ secret identity.5 Indeed, later interpreters of the story liked to stress that Abraham had no idea whom he was serving.6
In any event, just like Manoah and his wife, Abraham wishes to feed the visiting strangers, and they agree to eat (or at least to pretend to). Their gruff answer to Abraham’s invitation—“Do just as you have said”—might have tipped Abraham off that these were no ordinary visitors, but he seems to notice nothing unusual. He tells Sarah and the servant boy to prepare the food without mentioning who these guests are—apparently, he himself has no idea. Even their question, “Where is your wife Sarah?”—but how do these strangers know his wife’s name?—seems to arouse no curiosity in Abraham. Like Manoah and his wife, Abraham seems to be in some sort of fog. As in the previous example, the “moment of confusion” here is much more than a moment, it is apparently dragged out throughout the strangers’ meal. But in the end, the truth does seem to have dawned on both of them, for when God26 says to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh? . . . Is anything too much for the LORD?” Sarah immediately denies it “because she was frightened.” If she is frightened, it would seem that she has figured out with whom she is speaking. But not much is made of this—the moment of recognition here (if that is what it is) certainly seems to receive less attention than the “moment of confusion” that precedes it.
Apparently, there is something essential about these “moments of confusion”—otherwise there would be no reason to keep including them in all these narratives. In order to understand what that something is, it is necessary to observe another point about all these passages. While the “angel” is unrecognized at first—mistaken for an ordinary human being—after the recognition takes place, something equally striking occurs: usually, it is no longer an “angel” at all that is speaking, but God Himself. Thus, in the passage above about Abraham and the three men, these three effortlessly slide into being God at some point: “Then the LORD said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh?’” After the angel has ascended on the flames of the altar, Manoah and his wife are worried: “We will surely die,” they say, “because we have seen God.” “Go with these men,” the angel says to Balaam in yet another moment of confusion (Num. 22:35), “but speak only what I tell you to speak.”7 These words may be “said” by the angel, but they are God’s words: the “I” here refers to God and not some separate intermediary. (Note that God utters virtually the same sentence to Balaam—but without any intermediary—in a dream the night before [Num. 22:20].) In a sense, then, the angel is never really an angel—at first he looks like a man, but then he turns out to be God.
Here is another vivid example involving Abraham’s grandson Jacob:
And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of day. When he saw that he could not overcome him, he wrenched Jacob’s hip in its socket, so that the socket of Jacob’s hip was strained in the fight with him. Then he said, “Let go of me, since it is getting to be dawn.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He said, “What is your name?” and he answered, “Jacob.” He said, “Your name will not be Jacob any longer, but Israel, since you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.” Then Jacob said to him, “Please, now, tell me your name.” He answered, “Why should you be asking for my name?” and he blessed him there. Jacob named the place Peniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face and yet my life has been spared.”
At the beginning of the passage, Jacob’s wrestling partner is a “man,” and the fight lasts the whole night. But when the stranger is asked to bless Jacob, he obliges by giving him a new name and explaining that “you have struggled with God.” In a similar vein, Jacob names the place Peniel because “I have seen God face to face.” In other words, there really is no angel here at all, only an initial optical illusion, a “man,” who actually turns out to be God.
These narratives are really predicated on the first model mentioned above. It presumes that God does indeed have some kind of physical existence, a body—why not?—but that, in this physical existence, He usually is simply elsewhere, in what one might call another dimension. He stands just behind the curtain of the everyday world. Normally, that is where He stays, but sometimes He crosses over to our side, and when He does, human beings are at first unaware of what they are perceiving; they are in a fog. Perhaps because we normally perceive things through our five senses, a person at first encountering God will, in this first model, think that those senses are what is doing the perceiving. The person thus “sees” another human or “hears” his voice. Then, after a while, the person suddenly understands that all this is an illusion—he is not seeing or hearing at all. At that point he falls to his knees in reverence, and from now on it is God Himself who addresses him.
In a way, the moment of confusion that accompanied this first model seems to have been analogous to dreaming. When people describe a dream they had, they say things like: “I saw this man coming toward me—he was wearing a blue suit and had a little pearl-handled revolver in his hand. Then, suddenly, I heard a scream, and I turned around. . . .” But of course, the dreamer did not actually see or hear anything: his eyes were closed the whole night, and his ears were similarly shut off to outside noise. Nevertheless, whatever it was that was going on inside his brain was being processed as if there were actual visual and auditory stimuli—in fact, sleep researchers have discovered that a dreamer’s eyes will actually dart about needlessly behind his closed eyelids during a dream, as if he were actually seeing something. The biblical figures who encounter angels are not asleep, but what these texts seem to be saying is that their brains, like the brains of dreamers, initially processed the experience as if it were taking place “out there,” with some actual person who looks a certain way and speaks certain words. Only later does it become clear that the “person” being seen and heard is an illusion: the person becomes God Himself, and He is not “out there” at all. At that point, the human being falls to the ground in reverence and God “speaks” to him directly.8
What caused this first model of God to be created? The question is really backwards, as we shall see. The question should really be: what caused the second model to be created? The repeated portrayal of someone in a fog, someone upon whom it suddenly dawns that he has been talking to an optical illusion and that he is actually addressing God—this all has the ring of truth. However conventionalized such portrayals may eventually have become, behind them seems to stand a lived reality. Thus, although these narratives are talking about figures from the past, they themselves sound a bit like reports of a world not unfamiliar to the writers, and listeners, of these texts. It is the second model that requires explanation: it represents a certain shift in perception, an ideological shift, and one that came about in a specific set of circumstances far later in the history of biblical Israel.
So what is God like in the Genesis narratives—what sorts of things can He do and know, where is He to be found, and how does He interact with human beings? God is in some ways like a human being, although, of course, He is powerful: indeed, the power to do and control things that humans cannot is actually what defines the crucial difference between God and us. However, rather than being omnipresent, God in Genesis is frequently said to move about from place to place, and He apparently does not automatically just know everything. (He can find things out, but that is not quite the same thing.) As for where He is: normally, He is simply elsewhere, behind the curtain of everyday reality, but from time to time He crosses into this world. When He does so and encounters human beings, He inevitably appears to them at first as having a human-sized and human-shaped body, so that the humans naturally think they are encountering an ordinary person. So locked are they into their usual ways of perception, sight and sound, that they miss even the most obvious clues as to His real identity—they are in a fog. But then, suddenly, the truth dawns on them, and they realize that God is right there in front of them. This is the true God of much of the book of Genesis—indeed, of much of the Bible as a whole.
To say this is once again to highlight the gap between what we now know about the Bible and what ancient interpreters thought. From the end of the biblical period on, people have always read the stories of Genesis in keeping with the second model. That is why they said that God’s question to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” was really no question at all but an expression of reproof or lament: “Where are you now, and from what good have you removed yourself, O man?” (Philo), or “How could you imagine it possible to hide from Me?” (Targum Pseudo-Jonathan).9 As for God’s question to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” Josephus and other interpreters explained it as no real question at all but a mere interrogating tactic designed to get Cain to show his true colors. Of course God knew, these interpreters claimed; divine omniscience was the whole point of the story. The same was true of divine omnipresence; Abel’s great virtue, Josephus says, is that he believed “that God was with him in all his actions.” But this is the later model talking. During the earlier part of the biblical period, God does not dwell in the abstractions of omniscience and omnipresence; instead, He is right there, ready to enter and cross over into the human sphere, though unrecognized at first.
Even people of an abstract turn of mind may find themselves drawn, willy-nilly, to the God of Old. When the great French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) died, his coat was discovered to contain a piece of paper sewn inside the lining. On it were written a few disjointed sentences, but they said much about what this extraordinary thinker carried, literally, closest to his heart. In part the paper read: “Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not the God of philosophers and scholars . . . The world has not known You, but I have known You. Joy! Joy! Joy! Tears of joy!”