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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > December 2003

Seeing God

God appears in a colorful spectrum of images in the Bible.

By Mary Joan Winn Leith

How are we to perceive the divine when the Bible presents God in so many different guises? A familiar metaphor—the rainbow—might be helpful. A rainbow forms when drops of water split invisible white light into its component visible color spectrum. Similarly, the Bible makes God visible in a spectrum of characters. What does this God spectrum register? Roughly, the degree to which God is portrayed as human (or demonic) or transcendent. At one end of the spectrum there is the royal God of the Seven Days of Creation (Genesis 1–2:4)—transcendent, ineffable, omnipotent. This God has only to command, “Let […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Victor Hurowitz, “From Storm God to Abstract Being,” BR 14:05.

Endnotes

1.

Hosea 12:4–5 (English 12:3–4) in alluding to Jacob’s wrestling match seems to reflect ancient ambivalence about the nature of Jacob’s opponent; the verse ambiguously parallels “God” and “angel.” Unfortunately, the Hebrew text of Hosea is notorious for its bad state of preservation; textual problems in these verses frustrate attempts at a definitive translation.