Page - 26 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

26 | Johanna Stiebert www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 23–33 ity is linked to idolatry. Idolatry is a much-condemned major transgression12 – hence, conceiving God in corporeal terms is acutely problematic. This passage from Deuter- onomy, however, is almost singular in the explicitness of its emphasis on divine form- lessness; just a chapter later, where YHWH is speaking face-to-face with Moses (Deut. 5:4), form is again implied. The dominant depiction of the Hebrew Bible, therefore, is of divine corporeality, but the situation is far from univocal. God is imagined with a body, moreover a humanlike one, in many passages; elsewhere God’s formlessness is suggested and occasionally forcefully asserted. Over time, it seems, divine corporeality becomes increasingly veiled and obscured. According to source critics,13 indications of this shift exist already within the Hebrew Bible. A direct expression such as “the form of YHWH he [Moses] looks upon” (ûte- munat YHWH yabbît, Num. 12:8)14 is attributed to an earlier source. Comparable but less direct expressions derive from a later time and different source and reflect sub- sequent sensibilities, as in Exodus 16:7, which has in place of “you shall see YHWH” the buffered expression “and you shall see the glory of YHWH” (ûre’îtem ’et-kebôd YHWH; see also Exod. 16:10). Intertextually such an approach might be said to be self- fulfilling,15 but this tendency indeed becomes increasingly pronounced extratextually over time, as clearly evident when we compare the Hebrew Bible with subsequent Jewish writings. One of the arguments of classical source criticism is that the earliest source (J) typically uses divine anthropomorphism – God walking in the garden (Gen. 3:8) or inhaling the scent of sacrifice (Gen. 8:21); a later source (E) characteristically recruits intermediaries – the angel (rather than God) who calls from heaven (Gen. 22:11); and the latest source (P) depicts God as remote and non-anthropomorphic – as the ap- parently formless wind, or breath (rûach), hovering above the waters (Gen. 1:2). The 12 In the Babylonian Talmud idolatry is one of three exceptional sins (alongside certain acts of sexual immorality and murder) (Sanhedrin 74a). Giving up one’s life is preferable to committing any of these sins. 13 Source criticism proposes that all or parts of the Hebrew Bible (e.g. the Torah) are composite bodies of text, combining sources that were once independent. The most famous example is the Documen- tary Hypothesis associated above all with Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), which argues that the Torah shows traces of at least four once discrete sources (J, E, D and P – the Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources), alongside major editing processes. Each of J, E, D, and P is associated with char- acteristic vocabulary, as well as with a distinctive historical setting, theology, and ethnographic bias. Source criticism has its detractors and is not relevant to many forms of so-called higher criticism, such as literary criticism, which works with a final version of the biblical text. None the less, source criticism remains influential, and while which texts are allocated to which sources is widely debated, its basic tenets are very widely accepted. 14 Numbers 12 is using the very word for the divine form (temunâ) that is used in the aforementioned refutation of such in Deut. 4. Source-critically speaking, Num. 12 would be from an earlier source and Deut. 4 from a later source (presumably the D-source). 15 In the absence of proof for the arguments of source criticism (i.e. of discrete, once independent sourc- es), it too often becomes a case of deciding criteria and then allocating textual units to particular times and sources on the basis of these. Hence, divine anthropomorphism is routinely assigned to the earli- est (J) source and divine abstraction to the latest (P) source, suggesting a linearity of development for which there is little evidence. In fact, even in unambiguously later texts, as we will see, anthropomor- phism sometimes persists.