Seeing God

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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 there be light!” and, to borrow the words of Pharaoh Yul Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, “So must it be.” For Jews, Christians and Muslims, this is the most familiar view of God: a benevolent deity who speaks and divides and sees that all creation is “good.” The God of Genesis 1 defies definition (in the Latin sense of the word fine, “border”) most notably by transcending elemental human categories of male and female (Genesis 1:27).

At the other end of the spectrum, we encounter Jacob’s malevolent nocturnal assailant on the banks of the Jabbok River (Genesis 32:22–32; see also Exodus 4:24–26). Notwithstanding the squeamishness of past translators (including Josephus in the first century C.E.) who turned this eerie vampiresque “man” (Hebrew ’ish is used in Genesis 32:24) into an “angel” (mal’ak),¹ in the Hebrew text, neither the narrator (Genesis 32:29) nor Jacob (Genesis 32:31) expresses any doubt that Jacob/Israel has survived a run-in with God (Elohim). “Your name shall no longer be Jacob,” Jacob’s opponent tells him, “for you have striven with God and men and have prevailed” (Genesis 32:28). Jacob himself renames the site of the struggle Peniel, which means, “I have seen God face-to-face, yet my life has been spared” (Genesis 32:40).

Between these extremes, Israel’s Yahweh appears in a variety of modes. For example, through most of its history, Israel worshiped Yahweh as the divine warrior and storm god (see Psalm 29 and Judges 5). According to Israelite mythology, the storm god Yahweh “crushed the heads” of the chaos dragon to create both the world and Israel (see Psalm 74:12–17 and Isaiah 51:9–11). Yahweh the victorious divine warrior is also Israel’s divine monarch, the “King of Glory” (Psalm 24) who guarantees the power of Israel’s human king (Psalm 2).

In the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:4–3:24), Yahweh resembles an aristocratic parent establishing the household’s rules and consequences. Yahweh is also a potter who uses his own hands to shape the dust of the earth into the ’adam, and who avoids the day’s heat by taking a walk (presumably on two legs) in the garden in the cool evening breeze. Hardly omniscient, Yahweh here resorts to trial and error to figure out what kind of creature would be a suitable companion for the ’adam and only deduces that the two humans have eaten the forbidden fruit after their odd behavior betrays them.

Elsewhere, Yahweh changes his mind. In the Flood story, he decides to “blot out from the earth the humans I have created … for I am sorry that I have made them” (Genesis 6:6). Where does this God appear in our spectrum? It is difficult to tell, because the Bible describes changes of heart as both a uniquely divine and a uniquely human act. In 1 Samuel 15:11, God repents of making Saul king, yet a mere eight verses later (1 Samuel 15:29) the prophet Samuel pronounces that God “will not deceive or change his mind because he is not a human being” (’adam). Yet in Hosea 11:9, when a compassionate God decides not to carry out a threatened punishment, he cries out, “I will not execute my fierce anger … for I am God and no mortal.”

Occasionally, the ancient biblical editor daringly juxtaposes pictures of God in variant modes. Exodus 24 contains two versions of what happens on Mt. Sinai after the Israelites ratify the Sinai covenant.^a In the first, Moses and 73 select Israelite men see and share a covenant cookout with 054God: “They beheld God, and they ate and drank” (Exodus 24:9–11). The second version resists the least hint of divine anthropomorphism: “The appearance of the glory of Yahweh was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain” (Exodus 24:12–18).

Finally, without the tools of optic technology, we would be unaware of ultraviolet and infrared, colors on the light spectrum and in the rainbow that are invisible to the human eye. The God spectrum similarly allows for the discovery of previously undetected dimensions of Israel’s God. Archaeological discoveries over the last quarter-century have sent scholars back to their Bibles to discover there, too, evidence that Israel could perceive the divine as feminine, especially in the persona of Wisdom, who, according to Proverbs 8:22–32, was present at the 055Creation: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth …” (see also Proverbs 3:15–18).

For Noah the rainbow was the sign of God’s Covenant (Genesis 9:8–17), the visible symbol of God’s avowed relationship with all of creation. After the Flood, God promises Noah, “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and I will remember the everlasting Covenant” (Genesis 9:16). God looks at the rainbow and remembers; Bible readers should remember the rainbow when they look for God.

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 […]