Divine Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond Submitted by Alan William Bernthal-Hooker to ...

350 Pages·2017·2.02 MB·English

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‘You Shall Know Yahweh’:
Divine Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond
Submitted by Alan William Bernthal-Hooker to the University of Exeter
as a thesis for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Theology
In July 2017
This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright
material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.
I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified
and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a
degree by this or any other University.

Signature: …………Alan Bernthal-Hooker……………..
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ABSTRACT
The relationship between the chief Israelite deity Yahweh and his people is often
figured in terms of the so-called ‘marriage metaphor’, by which Yahweh is husband
and Israel wife. The sexual language used to describe Yahweh’s body and his attitude
towards Israel is taken to be a convenient method to outline the thoughts, feelings and
expectations Yahweh has of his people in terms of religious practice. However, this
has led to various interpretations in which divine sexuality in itself has been labelled
‘pagan’, an activity which Yahweh supposedly ‘transcends’.
The aim of this thesis is to question these interpretations. In the first part, an
examination of other ancient West Asian literature from Sumer, Ugarit and Egypt, each
depicting divine sexuality in stark terms, is completed in order to set a historical mark
by which the biblical texts themselves can be judged. In the second, a selection of
biblical passages is examined: some from the texts which are structured by the
marriage metaphor (as from Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah) and others not
(texts about bones, temples, urination, circumcision and loins).
Ultimately, one discovers that Yahweh is in fact embroiled within sexuality, whether in
the marriage metaphor or not, rather than transcendent above it and that Yahweh’s
body, described in heavily masculine terminology throughout the Bible, while indeed
sexualized, phallic and perhaps even penised, is nevertheless, ambiguous, liminal or
‘multigendered’ as to the features of his body. It is argued that this does not impede
Yahweh’s masculinity but may even work to strengthen it.
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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ....................................... 5
The Materiality of Yahweh’s Body .................................................................................... 15
God, Gender and Genitals ............................................................................................... 33
Text Selection and Interpretation ..................................................................................... 49
DIVINE SEXUALITY AT SUMER ........................................................................................ 56
Enki and Ninhursag ......................................................................................................... 56
Enki and Ninmah ............................................................................................................. 62
Enki and the World Order ................................................................................................ 65
Enlil and Ninlil .................................................................................................................. 69
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 72
DIVINE SEXUALITY AT UGARIT........................................................................................ 75
Introduction...................................................................................................................... 75
The Ritual Section ........................................................................................................... 78
The Mythic Section .......................................................................................................... 85
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 90
DIVINE SEXUALITY IN EGYPT .......................................................................................... 98
Introduction...................................................................................................................... 98
Creation ........................................................................................................................... 98
Death and Resurrection ................................................................................................. 105
Judgement .................................................................................................................... 112
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 118
PART TWO: BIBLICAL TEXTS ......................................................................................... 119
NAKED KNOWLEDGE: Adam, Eve and Divine Sexuality in Genesis 1-3 .......................... 121
Introduction.................................................................................................................... 121
Gendered Bodies .......................................................................................................... 122
Sexual Bodies ............................................................................................................... 134
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 148
’TIS PITY SHE’S A הנוז: ‘Harlotry’, Gender and the Prophetic Phallus .............................. 152
Introduction.................................................................................................................... 152
Hosea ............................................................................................................................ 161
Jeremiah ....................................................................................................................... 171
Isaiah............................................................................................................................. 187
Ezekiel........................................................................................................................... 195
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 212
YAHWEH’S PHALLUS AND EZEKIEL’S WOMB: The Prophet and the Valley of Dry Bone(r)s
in Ezekiel 36-37 ................................................................................................................ 217
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Introduction.................................................................................................................... 217
Bodily Displacement and Liminality ............................................................................... 218
Israel’s Dry Phallus ........................................................................................................ 226
The Turning of Yahweh ................................................................................................. 229
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 233
I SAW HIS לוש FILLING THE TEMPLE: Seraphs, Šūls and Sexuality in Isaiah 6.1-7 ........ 237
Introduction.................................................................................................................... 237
The Masculine Yahweh ................................................................................................. 239
God’s לוש ....................................................................................................................... 242
The Temple ................................................................................................................... 244
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 252
OF OTHER PHALLIC SPACES: Urination, Circumcision and Loins .................................. 256
Introduction.................................................................................................................... 256
Urination ........................................................................................................................ 258
Anal Baal verses Phallic Yahweh .................................................................................. 261
Circumcised and Un/veiled Penises .............................................................................. 266
Israel’s Loins ................................................................................................................. 286
Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 301
FINAL CONCLUSION AND REFLECTION ....................................................................... 304
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 312
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INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
This is a thesis about the sexual and gendered features of Yahweh’s body. Within the
Protestant and Western cultural contexts in which I write, such a topic might provoke
confusion, amusement, or downright hostility. After all, it is a commonly held idea that
God, if God exists, has neither body nor genitals; some may even decry these ideas
as heretical and heterodox. Scholars of the Hebrew Bible, however, have not shied
away from asking these types of questions and exploring just how the biblical writers
present the body, gender and sexuality of the Israelite deity Yahweh. It is no secret
that the Bible uses heavily masculine-coded language to talk about Yahweh. Among
other things, this god is described as a ‘man’ (שיא), a ‘warrior’ (רובג), a ‘husband’ (לעב)
and a ‘father’ (בא), while the use of the he/him pronoun set is ubiquitous in our
discourse about God. What, then, does the body of a deity described in such terms
look like? Do these masculine images and the ideologies surrounding them extend to
every area of the divine body? What would one see, for instance, if Yahweh were to
reveal what was under the ‘hem of his robe’ (Isa. 6.1) and would it coincide with what
one would expect given the masculocentric focus of the Hebrew Bible? In short, what
is the sexual and gendered form of Yahweh in the Israelite imagination and why is it
so?
Scholars themselves are divided on these issues. Tikva Frymer-Kensky
strongly opposes the notion of a sexual Yahweh, writing that Yahweh ‘is not at all
phallic, and cannot represent male virility and sexual potency’.1 According to Frymer-
Kensky, the deity neither ‘behave[s] in sexual ways’, nor is he ‘imagined below the

1 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, ‘Law and Philosophy: The Case of Sex in the Bible’, Jewish Explorations of
Sexuality, ed. Jonathan Magonet (Providence; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), 3-16: 4.
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waist’.2 It may be the case that Yahweh is envisioned as a husband to Israel in the
prophetic writings, but this, she argues, is metaphorical as the biblical writers utilize
no ‘physical descriptions’ to express this relationship between Yahweh and Israel.3
She goes as far as defining divine sexuality as ‘pagan’,4 a revealing equation in itself,
but one that is certainly part of historical biblical scholarship.5 In a similar vein, Mark
Smith writes that ‘Israelite society perceived Yahweh primarily as a god embodying
traits or values expressed by gendered metaphors yet transcending such particular
renderings’.6 Furthermore, Smith is critical of the arguments put forward by Stephen
Moore and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, the former for his claims of androgyny for
Yahweh and the latter because he detects a homoeroticism underlying the relationship
between Yahweh and his male followers. In Smith’s view, gendered imagery used of
Yahweh is ‘not so concerned with divine sexuality […] the issue is divine-human
interpersonal relations’.7
In contrast, Lyle Eslinger argues that some biblical texts portray Yahweh as a
sexual deity. For instance, in Isaiah 6.1-4, a text I shall examine later, Eslinger claims
that the prophet sees God’s penis.8 The purpose of this vision, he argues, is not to
show that Yahweh is ‘a man with a male member’,9 but that this theophany, this naked
self-revelation of God, is not the ‘sanitized experience’ of deity one would expect in
light of the cultic regulations circumscribing acceptable religious practice.10 One might

2 Frymer-Kensky, ‘Law and Philosophy’, 4.
3 Frymer-Kensky, ‘Law and Philosophy’, 4.
4 Frymer-Kensky, ‘Law and Philosophy’, 4.
5 Ken Stone, ‘Queering the Canaanite’, The Sexual Theologian: Essays on Sex, God and Politics, ed.
Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London; New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 110-
34: 119-21.
6 Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic
Texts (New York: Oxford University, 2001), 91.
7 Smith, Biblical Monotheism, 92.
8 Lyle Eslinger, ‘The Infinite in a Finite Organical Perception (Isaiah VI 1-5)’, Vetus Testamentum 45.2
(1995), 145-173: 157.
9 Eslinger, ‘The Infinite’, 158.
10 Eslinger, ‘The Infinite’, 159.
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wonder whether, if the purpose of the vision is emphatically not to reveal that Yahweh
is a god with genitals, the writer of the text and the intended audience already presume
the deity is a genitaled one.

Feminist biblical scholars have also drawn attention to Yahweh’s sexuality. Mary
Shields, for example, in her discussion of Ezekiel 16’s portrayal of Yahweh and the
god’s violent relationship to a female-depicted Israel, notes that many commentators
avoid discussing Yahweh’s sexuality in the text,11 which so viscerally describes the
‘gang rape’ and ‘mutilation’ of an apparently ‘ungrateful’ and ‘whoring’ young woman
(Israel).12 All the punishments mentioned are meted out by an affronted Yahweh,
incensed that he is not the sole focus of female Israel’s sexuality. In refusing to ignore
these details, one finds it difficult to accept Smith’s claim that Yahweh, in the view of
certain Israelites, somehow transcends the ‘gendered metaphors’ used to describe
him rather than being embroiled within them. That Ezekiel 16 may be metaphorical
does not obviate the fact that the biblical writer is heavily invested in the imagery he
uses and is content to characterize Yahweh by it. The writer also displays no unease
in ascribing such behaviour, which is inextricably bound up in gendered and sexual
expectations, to Yahweh.
Smith’s claim that monotheistic Yahwism ‘is beyond sexuality yet nonetheless
expressed through it’13 is at odds with the sexually charged and gendered portrayal of
the male-female relationship that orders a large part of the prophetic narratives
concerning Yahweh. Furthermore, the idea that gendered metaphors are less about
sexuality than ‘interpersonal relations’ does not take seriously the claim that gender

11 Mary E. Shields, ‘Body Rhetoric and Gender Characterization in Ezekiel 16’, Journal in Feminist
Studies in Religion 14.1 (1998), 5-18: 15 n. 34.
12 Shields, ‘Body Rhetoric’, 6.
13 Smith, Biblical Monotheism, 91.
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and sexuality as social structures set the limits and permissibilities of relationships
themselves. Linda Singer notes that the organization of these relationships is
‘conflictual’ insofar as social differences between subjects position them as dominant
or passive and thus create a context permeated by inequality.14 For example, in a
context where men are valued more than women, ‘interpersonal relationships
(particularly of the heterosexist variety) will always be characterized by rupture,
refusal, conflict and disappointment’.15 This is particularly true in the case of the
relationship between Yahweh and Israel which, in Ezekiel 16, takes on considerably
violent tones; it is this violence, as Beauvoir might argue,16 that creates, contributes to
and sustains Israel’s status as other. If the environment of the text is structured around
this gendered image of violation, such that violation becomes a defining feature of
what it means to be male in the narrative, then the argument for transcendence falters.
Indeed, the biblical texts which describe Yahweh’s relationships with others are written
in a similar male-privileged context; it is therefore unlikely that gendered descriptions
of the deity have little sexuality-related content to convey especially when cultural
ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman are invested in sexuality and sexual
norms. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne note that one of the ‘implicit premises’
in the standard use of ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ is the combination of ‘anatomy, learned
behaviour and desire’ such that ‘normal’ male identity is heterosexual.17 Judith Butler
also argues that a ‘compulsory and naturalized’ heterosexuality orders cultural
understandings of gender in which the ‘differentiation [of the masculine term from the

14 Linda Singer, ‘Interpretation and Retrieval: Rereading Beauvoir’, Women’s Studies International
Forum 8.3 (1985), 231-238: 236.
15 Singer, ‘Interpretation and Retrieval’, 236.
16 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier
(New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 108.
17 Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, ‘Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and
Anthropology’, Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy
Lindisfarne (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 11-47: 11.
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feminine] is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire’.18 Monique
Wittig, for whom ‘sex’ is to be understood as ‘a mark that is somehow applied by an
institutionalized heterosexuality’,19 recognized this entanglement of desire and gender
when she wrote that the lesbian ‘is not a woman’ precisely because she refuses
heterosexuality: ‘what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man’.20 The
‘sexual regulation of gender’21 that Butler writes about is also a useful tool in reading
the Hebrew Bible’s attitudes towards gender. The woman, for instance, is brought into
existence juxtaposed with the man from whom she is taken (Gen. 2.23); for this
reason, שיא and השא will joined together to become ‘one flesh’ (Gen. 2.24). Not only
is there a social relation between the השא and שיא through sex and family ties, but the
השא is literally constructed (הנב) from him (and later in Genesis 2.16 is defined by the
desire she is forced to orient toward him).
A similar ideology is found in Leviticus 18.22 in which male addressees are
commanded not to ‘lie with a man’ (בכשת אל רכז־תא) in the ‘lying downs of a woman’
(השא יבכשמ). Theodore Jennings argues that this prohibition is addressed to men who
are penetrated, who are willingly making themselves ‘like women’; this, he notes, is in
opposition to similar texts in other ancient West Asian legal documents where the
concern is the male penetrator.22 Saul Olyan, however, on the basis of a similarity
between ‘the lying downs of a woman’ and ‘the lying downs of a man (רכז)’ in other
biblical texts, argues rather that the message in Leviticus 18.22 is directed at the

18 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York; London:
Routledge, 2006), 31.
19 Butler, Gender Trouble, 35.
20 Monique Wittig, ‘One is not Born a Woman’, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry
Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York; London: Routledge, 1993), 103-109:
108.
21 Butler, Gender Trouble, xiv.
22 Theodore W. Jennings, Jr, Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel
(New York; London: Continuum, 2005), 209.
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penetrating male.23 Thus the structure of the text naturalizes the idea that men should
lie with women and makes the sexual penetration of women a defining characteristic
of what it means to be a man. For this reason, both parties, not just male penetratees,
are forfeiting their social masculinity in that it is not just penetration per se that is
conceived of as a male attribute. The penetrator-penetratee relationship of Leviticus
18.22 (and 20.13) is not regarded in terms of a ‘normal’ male-female coupling where
the penetrator is seen as the man and the penetratee the woman since in fact neither
of the parties in Leviticus 18.22 or 20.13 is adhering to masculine roles.
If Yahweh can be called a man (רכז\שיא), how does this ‘sexual regulation of
gender’ apply to him? After all, the gendered metaphor in which Israel is depicted as
Yahweh’s sexual partner/victim raises the issue of whether Yahweh had a divine
consort. Epigraphical discoveries from Khirbet el-Qom and Kuntillet ‘Ajrud attest to the
possibility that Yahweh did indeed have a paredra, namely, the goddess Asherah,24
and hints of her presence in the biblical texts suggest that she was, at one time, a
normative part of the temple-based Israelite cult.25 In Ugaritic mythology, this goddess
(Athirat) was the consort of the high god El, with whom she had seventy divine sons.26
A comparable theology is found in Deuteronomy 32.7-12 which may preserve an older

23 Saul M. Olyan, ‘“And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying down of a Woman”: On the Meaning
and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 5.2 (1994): 179-
206.
24 William G. Dever, ‘Recent Archaeological Confirmation of the Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel’,
Hebrew Studies 23 (1982), 37-43; Ziony Zevit, ‘The Khirbet el-Qôm Inscription Mentioning a Goddess’,
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984), 39-47; Judith M. Hadley, ‘The Khirbet
el-Qom Inscription’, Vetus Testamentum 37.1 (1987), 50-62; J. A. Emerton, ‘“Yahweh and His Asherah”:
The Goddess or Her Symbol?’, Vetus Testamentum 49.3 (1999), 315-337.
25 Susan Ackerman, ‘At Home with the Goddess’, Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past:
Canaan, Ancient Israel, and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina:
Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and
American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000, ed. W. G. Dever and S.
Gitin (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 455-468; Francesca Stavrakopoulou, ‘“Popular” Religion and
“Official” Religion: Practice, Perception, Portrayal’, Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah, ed.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton (London; New York: T&T Clark International, 2010), 37-
58: 42-43.
26 Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament, JSOT Supplement
Series 232 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 58.