The God of the Hebrews: A Collection of Quotes

The God of the Hebrew People

I turn now from the form of the literature to its content. No area of Hellenistic culture influenced the Jews as much as philosophy. The God of the Hebrew Bible is very different from the supreme God of Plato and Aristotle. The former is a anthropomorphic being capable of anger, joy and other emotions, who created the world and continues to direct human affairs. The God of the philosophers, however, was a much less human and much more abstract figure, incapable of emotion, and far removed from the daily concerns of humanity (see chapter 3). Many Jews tried to combine these two conceptions, or, more precisely, to interpret the God of the Bible in the light of the ideas of the philosophers, especially Plato. In his numerous essays on the Torah, Philo tried to demonstrate that the God of Judaism was very like the God of Plato, and that the stories of Genesis were not mere amusing diversions but hid profound philosophical truths. This approach to scripture was developed even further by Origen, Ambrose, and other fathers of the church, but its first great exponent was Philo and its origins reach back to Alexandrian Jewry of the third century B.C.E. (Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Westminster Press, 1986) p. 44.

The God of the Philosophers vs. the God of the Bible

The God of the Hebrew Bible is for the most part an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic being, that is, a God who has the form and emotions of humans. He (it is a he) walks and talks, has arms and legs, becomes angry, happy, or sad, changes his mind, speaks to humans and is addressed by them, and closely supervises the affairs of the world. The God of philosophers is a different of being altogether: abstract (the Prime Mover, the First Cause, the Mind or Soul of the Universe, etc.), immutable, and relatively unconcerned with the affairs of humanity. The tension between these rival conceptions of the Deity is evident in the work of Philo, who is able to find a philosophically respectable God in the Torah only through allegorical exegesis (see chapter 6). Philo is particularly careful to sanitize the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic passages. In the land of Israel the pressure to interpret the Bible in this fashion was less intense, but even here many of the Targumim, the Aramaic translations of scripture, reduce or eliminate the scriptural anthropomorphisms.

Perhaps some Jews were concerned about the very unphilosophical image of God in the Hebrew scriptures, but most Jews were not. Apocalyptic visionaries and mystics persisted in seeing God sitting on his throne surrounded by his angelic attendants. The rabbis had no difficulty in believing in a God who loves and is loved and with whom one can argue. The masses needed (and need!) a God who is accessible and understandable. In the fourth century most of the monks in Egypt understood the anthropomorphisms of scripture literally. After all, God declares, “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26), proof that the image of man is the image of God. After hearing a pastoral letter from the bishop of Alexandria and a sermon from his abbot whish insisted that the scriptural anthropomorphisms were to be understood allegorically because God has no shape, one elderly monk arose to pray but could not. “Woe is me! They have taken my God away from me!” he wailed. Popular piety does not need or want an immutable and shapeless Prime Mover; it wants a God who reveals himself to people, listens to prayer, and can be grasped in human terms. This is the God of the Shema, the Bible and liturgy. This is the God of practically all the Hebrew and Aramaic, and some of the Greek, Jewish literature of antiquity. It is not, however, the God of the philosophers. (Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Westminster Press, 1986) pp. 86-87.

The Midrash abounds upon this subject (i.e. Mercy). God lamented the severe sentence he had to pass on Adam; he mourned for six days before the flood; the death of Nadab and Abihu was twice as hard for him as even for their father Aaron. God himself suffers in the suffering of men: ‘In all their affliction he was afflicted,’ etc. (Isa. 63:9). He was with Israel in Egypt; he went into exile with them to Babylon, and was delivered with them... These illustrations from a single compilation of “sermon stuff” suffice. The humanity of God is, indeed, written all over the revelation as it was read by philosophically unsophisticated men; the preachers at most did no more than to seek to improve less obvious texts. Often they also held up this side of God’s character as an example for man’s imitation and a motive to it. (Moore, George Foot. Judaism In the First Centuries of the Christian Era. 2 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927) pp. 393-394.

The God of the Bible is in its own expressive phrase a ‘live God,’ that does things; Philo’s God is pure Being, of which nothing Can be predicated but that It is, abstract static Unity, eternally, unchangeably the same; pure immaterial intellect. (Moore, George Foot. Judaism In the First Centuries of the Christian Era. 2 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927) p. 416.

The philosophical horror of ‘anthropomorphisms’ which Philo and Maimonides entertained was unknown to the Palestinian schools. They endeavored to think of God worthily and to speak of him reverently; but their criterion was the Scripture and the instinct of piety, not an alien metaphysics. (Moore, George Foot. Judaism In the First Centuries of the Christian Era. 2 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927) p. 438.