The newest issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature has been released, and it features an article by Mark S. Smith entitled “The Three Bodies of God” that I found both interesting and somewhat problematic. Here’s the abstract:
Considerable attention has been devoted to God’s body in the Hebrew Bible, but its widely differing representations have not been addressed. This article sketches out a typology of three types of divine bodies, based on different scales, locations, and settings in life: a natural “human” body; a superhuman-sized “liturgical” body; and a “cosmic” or “mystical” body.
The primary literature with which Smith interacts includes Benjamin Sommer’s The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Esther Hamori’s “When Gods Were Men”, and Andreas Wagner’s Gottes Körper. As with these authors, Smith seems to presuppose a great deal of harmony tying the various conceptualizations of deity together…
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