Footloose or Footless God? LXX and anthropomorphisms in Ex. 24:10
(2021) Divine Bodies — Location: Glasgow University (1.April.2021)
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- The Ancient Testament represents God as a personal god, who appears as an embodied god with frequent references to his human-like body and activities, most extremely so in Gen. 18 and 32, where God is a man (Hamori, 2008). Besides this socalled anthropomorphic tendency in presenting God with a human body, the Ancient Testament also testifies of another tendency to reduce these references to God’s human-like body. Texts as Num. 23:19 and Dt. 4:16 stress that God is not a man, and is without form. This play between anthropomorphistic language and anti-anthropomorphic reply recently gained attention from Septuagint-scholars (e.g. Ausloos,2018). In the current development of a “Septuagint-theology” (Ausloos & Lemmelijn, 2020), attention is payed to the so-called anti-anthropomorphisms of the Septuagint, where the Greek translator altered Hebrew anthropomorphisms to avoid the idea of God having a human body. If God is, in the Hebrew Bible, an embodied God with hands,mouth and nose, scholars presuppose that this is much less the case in the Septuagint. The Greek translator would have been influenced by a tendency to spiritualize anthropomorphic conceptions of God (Fritsch, 1943). However, this presumed anti-anthropomorphic tendency of the Septuagint often seems to reflect modern scholars’ discomfort regarding God’s embodiment, rather than a characteristic tendency of the Greek translation. Moreover, the evolution from “primitive anthropomorphism” to a “more developed spiritual conception” is uncritically presupposed by many Septuagint-scholars (Knafl, 2011). A close-reading of the surprising verse Ex. 24:10b within the verses 24:9-11 (generally regarded as anti-anthropomorphic in translation (Wyckoff, 2012)), should offer a clear example. In Ex. 24:10b, reference is made to God’s feet. Surprisingly, the Greek preserves the bodily language, while the Greek Dt. 33:3 omits this. Throughout the close-reading, I hope to offer a first step to a more nuanced view on the Septuagint’s treatment of bodily language concerning God.
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De Doncker, E. (2021). Footloose or Footless God? LXX and anthropomorphisms in Ex. 24:10. Divine Bodies, Glasgow University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/114591