The REAL God Of The BIBLE
Would you like to see the God of the Bible exactly as the ancient worshippers did? We explore the origins and evolution of this divine figure central to ancient Israel. Our exploration delves into the roots of the ancient biblical deity, often referred to as Yahweh, tracing the lineage back to the earlier deity El. Through historical and archaeological insights, we bring to life the physical body of God that ancient worshippers understood. This documentary also sheds light on lesser-known topics, including the powerful figure of Asherah, traditionally seen as the companion or consort in this ancient pantheon. Join us as we unveil the secrets and mysteries of these ancient deities, set against the rich tapestry of the ancient Near Eastern world.
The real God of the Bible is often misunderstood. Those who cherish this God have manipulated the actual reality of the texts where he appears most frequently: the Bible. And yes, I said “he,” because God is described vividly as being a masculine warrior, just like the rest of the known ancient Near Eastern gods. We will unravel the mystery of who the real God of the Bible is by showing you exactly what he looked like. Notice I am using “looked like” in the past tense; this is because the ongoing interpretations of the text describing this God have buried his physical existence in a black hole of philosophy. They have buried God in a metaphysical grave by ignoring the obvious texts which describe him.
I want to be upfront and say this documentary is inspired by Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s absolute goldmine book, God: An Anatomy. This book is one of the greatest reads I have ever come across pertaining to bringing God back to life in his original setting: the ancient Near East. For those who don’t know, Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a British biblical scholar and broadcaster; she is currently a professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter. Her frustration with people completely ignoring these ancient texts for their theological limitations is also my frustration. I want to know the truth—meaning, what does the evidence actually say? Can we come to actually see the God of the Bible for what he would have looked like if we situate him in his historical and cultural context?
I share the desire to see this God, to whom I once devoted my everything, in his actual context. For most of my early life, I believed in the supernatural, where God resides, and that this God was actively controlling this world and its fate. The closest I would come to seeing God was in my imagination, mind, or dreams. I would often equate this God with Jesus and could put a face to God through the New Testament image of Christ. As I started studying the Bible without my theological baggage, I discovered a whole new amazing world around the Bible.
Here is an analogy: imagine being at a David Blaine magic show with thousands in attendance. A person wearing a hoodie in the back corner, away from the rest of the crowd, whispers, “Hey, you, would you like to know exactly how he does his tricks?” Imagine I respond, “What do you mean by ‘trick’? David has actual powers; he actually has the ability to do the things we are witnessing.” This person insists that David is performing an illusion, that he doesn’t actually have powers. They say, “I can show you how man-made this whole show really is, if you’re interested.” My response is a bit bewildered because I believed that David had the actual powers to perform real magic. I answer, “Uh, sure, I’m interested in seeing how he does it.” In my mind, I am extremely skeptical that this is just an illusion, and I am also really afraid of my deepest convictions of the magical world being shattered—of it just being an illusion. Part of me wants to really know, and the other part is just afraid.
I follow him behind the curtain, and he shows me the “wizard” with its excellent ability to create an illusion, which gives a mass placebo to the auditorium. I now know it’s a trick, but does that take away my excitement? Does this ruin the fun for me? It made me ask this person, “Show me more.” My desire to understand at a far, far deeper level has been unlocked. From this point onward, I hang out at the David Blaine shows with my dark hoodie, whispering to the crowd, “Do you really want to know how he does it?”
Understanding the Bible, which also entails the God central to it, is a bit like this magic show. Francesca Stavrakopoulou gets it; she sees behind the curtain of theological trickery and shows you God as he really is, or really was. She describes how, as an undergraduate in college, she found that feminist scholars took a look at the maleness of God in scripture and how they would just remove God’s body from the equation to solve these gender issues. She recounts her engaging in a Q&A with a Christian professor who insisted on the corporeal context of God’s body being metaphorical or poetic. She soberly expresses herself: “Everyone else in the room seemed remarkably content with this approach to the God of the Bible, but I found it deeply frustrating.”
Why should I look past the clear image of God as a gigantic man with a heavy tread, weapons in his hands, and breath as hot as sulfur? A God who took on a monstrous sea dragon in a physical fight and won? A God who walked about in his heavenly garden and in the cemeteries of his people? A God who stripped a woman naked and offered her up to be gang-mutilated? A God who sat on a throne in a temple, enjoying the aroma of scorched animal fat as he waited for his dinner? A God who not only had children but who willingly and willfully offered up his beloved son to be killed as a sacrifice?
How could I not be distracted? Here was a deity just like those I’d visited in museums as a child: a God of ancient myths, fantastic stories, and long-lost rituals; a God from the distant past, from a society utterly unlike our own. Those were the terms on which I wanted to encounter him—not as a distant and abstract being, but as the product of a particular culture at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then; a God shaped by their own physical circumstances, their own view of the world, and their own imaginations. The God which is expressed in her book, God: An Anatomy, and of course this documentary, is the deity as his ancient worshippers saw him: a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking God with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and the monstrous.
Following Dr. Stavrakopoulou’s book, I will highlight the strong takeaways from her work in this documentary. However, you must understand that her book is so unbelievably fantastic that you would be committing an unforgivable sin not purchasing a copy; it goes into several sources we won’t be able to cover in this video. I will also follow her chapter titles for each section as she performs an examination of God’s body and will attempt to follow along with the flow of her book. She doesn’t shy away from looking at every part of this male deity. Shocking to most, she even reveals God’s “family jewels,” which played a significant part in producing godly offspring. Doesn’t this imply God might have a wife or partner? Maybe she will watch this and appreciate MythVision’s dedication to staying true to her research and to crediting her for her brilliant masterpiece. Thank you, Francesca; here is to you, my friend.
Spanning back in time, even before written history, humans have made gods into their own images. We all know the famous biblical cliché, “We are all made in the image of God.” However, experts in the study of mind and cultures have known for a long time that the way people think and the biases they have play a big role in how they imagine and create the idea of gods or a higher power in their societies. More than 2,500 years ago, during the late 500s or 400s BCE, a Greek thinker and explorer named Xenophanes of Colophon already figured this out: “If cattle and horses or lions had hands or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.”
Xenophanes saw the problem: that each culture had a god in their own image. He saw that these gods from all over acted very much like humans, which he saw as an issue for the divine. Looking at how Homer and Hesiod paint the gods as having committed acts unbefitting for the gods by stealing, committing adultery, and tricking each other, his philosophy led him to denounce gods being human-like by their actions, thoughts, or nature. He was also one of the earlier Greek poets and philosophers who can be credited in nudging things toward monotheism. Later Greek minds like Plato (429–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), and schools of thought carrying this torch, taught that the ultimate power that supports and creates everything in the universe doesn’t have a physical form; it is an invisible, unseen force or mind that is completely different from the world we can touch and see. Most common folk still held the idea of the gods having bodies like us. These philosophical ideas would eventually have Jewish and Christian thinkers separate their idea of God from the material world, with God dwelling in the spiritual, heavenly realm, completely divorced from the earthly, human one. Thanks to Plato’s influence on Western constructions of God, these philosophical notions are actually not compatible with the Bible.
God is clearly expressed in anthropomorphic terms, which simply means God has attributes or qualities very human-like, because this is exactly how these ancient authors understood their God. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'” Have you ever noticed the plural description of God creating man and woman? This is clearly the divine entourage with God who participate in creating mankind. But most don’t pay attention to the description of making man in God’s image—at least most theologically minded believers, that is. Because man was made to look like the gods. Yes, that is right: according to Genesis, Adam and Eve were made to look just like God visually, which made humans superior to all other creatures. You might be shocked or skeptical, but a few chapters later, we get a closer description of what is implied by being made in the image of someone: “When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and he named him Seth.” Elsewhere, we see that divine statues are the visual likeness of the gods they represent.
Genesis 1 creation was potentially written in the 5th century, drawing on older myths portraying a God named Yahweh who just ruled Jerusalem, but today is seen as the universal God. When this was written, Yahweh was the chief deity among many gods, similar to the Babylonian Marduk or Zeus from the Greek world. He was still centuries away from being seen as without a body. As Francesca says in the book, instead, he was just like any other deity in the ancient world. He had a head, hair, and a face, eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth. He had arms, hands, legs, and feet, and a chest and a back. He was equipped with a heart, a tongue, teeth, and genitals. He was a God who breathed in and out. This was a deity who not only looked like a human—albeit on a far more impressive, glamorous scale—but who very often behaved like a human. He enjoyed evening strolls and hearty meals. He listened to music, wrote books, and made lists. He was a God who not only spoke but whistled, laughed, shouted, wept, and talked to himself. He was a God who fell in love and into rages, a God who squabbled with his worshippers and grappled with his enemies, a God who made friends, raised children, took wives, and had sex. She expresses that this isn’t something on some old clay tablets of mythologies about gods; this is the clear language of the Bible.
This Bible is made of several books with various genres, with the first parts of the Bible being the Hebrew original called Tanakh by Judaism and “Old Testament” by Christians. The Tanakh was written between the 8th and 2nd centuries BCE in Judah. Judah was the area we call today Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Western Syria. Judah was conquered by Assyria in the 8th century BCE, again by Babylon in the 6th century BCE, and was part of the Persian Empire in the 5th century BCE. Then they were brought into Alexandria when Alexander the Great brought the empire around 333 BCE. The biblical texts express these changes from political empire to the next while giving fun stories of very ancient, mythical, and legendary heroes. It contains oracles claimed to come from various prophets, as well as poetry, ritual songs, prayers, and teachings. Absolutely none of these texts have made it down to us in their original form, with scribes recreating, making additions, and revisions, all to reflect the interest of later generations.
It is safe to say that the Torah and the remainder of the primary history portray God’s special relationship with Israelites. These authors crafted a past for their heritage, giving them a unique identity. Much of the writings that discuss historical events should be taken with a grain of salt. While there are real events described in some of the material, non-biblical material has shown us the Bible’s portrayal of past events should not be taken as reliable recorded history. Don’t believe me? Well, take the 9th-century BCE Northern Kingdom of Israel ruler named Omri. In the biblical texts, he is demoted and insignificant, with only a mention of founding Samaria. A stone monument set up by Mesha, the king of Moab—a place near ancient Israel—celebrates taking back large areas of land from Omri, king of Israel, and his follower, who had ruled over Moab for a long time. Records from Assyria, a powerful empire during the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, often refer to the Kingdom of Israel as “Omri-land” and its kings as “sons of Omri,” showing that Omri’s influence lasted a long time. However, the writer of the books of Kings in the Bible downplayed or even hid how important Omri was. This is hinted at by a brief mention of “the rest of the acts of Omri and the power that he showed.”
It is obvious the authors had Jerusalem as their central focus, with the only legitimate worship of Yahweh. The problem was there were several Yahweh temples in town, and these authors portrayed Judah’s kings who closed them down as righteous. Archaeology has revealed an 8th-century BCE Southern Judah Yahweh fortress, another in the 5th-century Egyptian island of Elephantine, as well as a 5th- to 2nd-century BCE Mount Gerizim site. The point being, the worship of Yahweh was not as centralized as these elite authors pinned it to be in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is so driven by ideology that it is often unreliable. Living with the trauma of the Babylonian troubles leading into the Persian Empire, potentially starting the literary works we see today during the Second Temple period, scribes and priests were successful and reworked old texts, creating new ones through the perception of exile, return, and restoration. Of course, the texts exaggerate that all Judah sites experienced restoration, but reality shows only the elites and some of the higher classes had even been deported to Babylonia, and the majority remained there in Judah. Many Judah sites migrated to various locations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant during these heated political times. Eventually, Greece takes over from Persia, where most Jewish peoples read in Aramaic and Greek. This led to the reading of their sacred scriptures in these languages. Among them were the Jewish Jesus movement, which took on a life of its own over a few generations with all their literature—gospels, epistles—written in Greek, and their text overshadows the Hebrew scriptures as time goes by.
Okay, okay, back to God’s body. There isn’t a single place anywhere in the Bible denying God’s body; in fact, it is only affirmed. Some mortals were lucky enough to see it. After leaving Egypt, a group of Israelite leaders went up to Mount Sinai and saw what they believed were God’s feet, and then God himself. Moses was among them and is said to have had a regular, friendly chat with God as if talking to a friend. But Moses wasn’t the only one who reportedly encountered God in person in the Bible’s Genesis; Abraham walks with God and Jacob wrestles with him. The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, in the books named after them, both describe seeing God on his throne, while Amos sees him standing in a temple. In the New Testament, Jesus claims he has seen God and is even described as sitting next to God in heaven. One may point to Adam walking with God in the cool of the day, or Stephen from the book of Acts, or also John in Revelation on the island of Patmos.
During the Second Temple period, circa 515 BCE to 70 CE—when the temple was destroyed—people understood God to hide his body from the world, not visible to most humans. Just because a body can’t be seen doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The Ten Commandments hint at a suggestion that the idea of making images of God was a normal practice by those worshipping Yahweh: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, whether in the likeness of what is in the heavens above or what is on the earth below or what is in the waters beneath the earth.” The Israelites were no different than their next-door neighbors. People believed that while gods usually stayed hidden in their heavenly homes, they could choose to show themselves on Earth as statues and places of worship. These statues weren’t just symbols; people believed that statues were the actual God, not just a representation of them. People today think this is stupid; however, that is misrepresenting these ancient minds. They perceived reality not just through the physical, but from natural to supernatural. They saw these realms to be passable in both directions; these gods could technically be in more than one place in their world. Francesca mentions how ancient Mesopotamian ritual experts comment on the gods: the divine statue was born in heaven and made on Earth. Technically, these gods weren’t limited to one location; they could be invisible in the heavens at the same time showing up as stars, statues, and places of worship, figurines at home, or even natural or even invisible forces on Earth.
But I can hear the apologist say, “The ban on images is evidence that God didn’t have a body and shouldn’t be portrayed in idols, making this God different.” You are wrong, my friends. Several cults from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and the Phoenicians practiced what is called aniconism. Aniconism is when religions or cultures don’t create images or figures to represent things from the natural world, the supernatural, or certain beings. You can find this in Buddhism as well as Islam. Shoot, it even shows up in certain places in Hinduism. And while these earlier cults practiced imageless worship, they were understood to have bodies. Prohibiting divine images in the Ten Commandments points towards God’s hiddenness of his body, not that he didn’t have one. This idea is a step in the direction of the abstract, incapable deity of the post-biblical religions of Judaism and Christianity. The Bible describes God as having a human-like form, a personal name, a history, a family, and even a group of heavenly beings that accompany him.
God’s real name is Yahu, Yaho, or even Yah. It’s really impossible to know at this point. The ancient Hebrew language, like modern Hebrew and Arabic, only used consonants in writing, so in old writings, God’s name appeared as YHWH, and you see this on the screen, and we’re not sure how it was pronounced. The longer version, what looks like Yahweh, is the one most often found in the Bible’s ancient Hebrew texts. Add to this difficulty: the name eventually becomes unutterable. Though some Greek and Roman scholars pronounced it as Yahweh or Yah, which became the known way of saying Yahweh. Yahweh was among many gods in the late Bronze Age to early Iron Age (1500 BCE to 550 BCE). This polytheistic world portrayed the gods as having families and social structure mirroring their human worshippers. El was seen as head of the pantheon of gods among most societies in the Levant. He was considered the main God in charge of the universe, with other lesser gods beneath him. Each of these lesser gods was responsible for different parts of the universe and life, like storms, the ocean, sunlight, stars, fertility, birth, war, and death. The collection of gods in Ugarit, a region in the Levant, was typically for the religions there around 1,000 to 2,000 BCE, which is when the early worship of Yahweh started. This group of gods was formed based on the very human idea that being a God without any connections to others meant missing out on the advantages of working together, having a status, and having family ties. In other words, a God without these social connections was seen as powerless and, frankly, of no use to humans.
To be quite frank, the Bible expresses this: God wasn’t alone. A piece of old pottery in the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible places Yahweh among a group of gods and even tells us who his father was. It talks about how humans were split into different groups or nations, and each group was given a specific God to look after it. But the God in charge of this arrangement wasn’t Yahweh; it was El Elyon, a name for El that shows his status as the “most high” God in the group: “When Elyon, Most High, apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the divine sons. For Yahweh’s portion was his people, Jacob, Israel, his allotted share.” Yep, you heard that right: Yahweh had a dad and divine siblings. But it doesn’t end there. The Bible reveals other things about Yahweh’s earlier career, which is shocking to some. Some of these mythical elements of Yahweh’s past run contrary to the demythologizing efforts of some of the later scribes. Rather than supreme king of the world, Yahweh gets depicted as a badass, fierce storm God on the outskirts of the occupied world in ancient places called Seir, Paran, and Teman. This area is depicted as a risky and mountain wasteland. It seems to be situated south of the Negev desert, past the Dead Sea, in a region that was once known as Edom and is now part of Southern Jordan. Yahweh, one of the ancient gods, might have been similar to a wild and rowdy bunch of gods known as the shaddai or shaddai gods. These gods were associated with the wilderness and were not the top dogs; that honor went to a God named El.
An exciting discovery in Deir Alla, a place in the Eastern Jordan Valley, gave us a peek into the world of these wild gods. Here, a building wrecked by an earthquake around 800 BCE held a secret. Archaeologists found broken pieces of a long message that once decorated a wall. When they put the pieces together, they told a story about a guy named Balaam bin Beor, who could see into the future and even shows up in a story in the Bible. The message said that a bunch of gods came to Balaam with a warning: the shaddai or shaddai gods were plotting against their boss, El. They planned to cover the sky in thick clouds, leaving the world in darkness. The gods told Balaam, “This will happen, and nothing will survive. What you’ve heard is unlike anything anyone has seen.” They left Balaam pretty shaken up. These heavenly rebellions are common in ancient West Asian myths, but showing that El is the chief deity over shaddai gods finds parallel to the title given El, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as El Shaddai. People have wrongly assumed the name means “God Almighty,” but it actually means something like “God of the Wilderness.”
Academics have known for a long time now that El, not Yahweh, was the original God of Israel. From the Bible, his name is not only in the patriarchs but is also the name of Israel, meaning “Israel” (the El suffix). Yahweh would eventually kick daddy off the throne and become the top dog. How this happened exactly isn’t clear. We know that El’s role in the tradition remained, and it becomes clear later scribes tried rationalizing Yahweh’s takeover by suggesting, “Well, he was actually El all along.” “I am Yahweh,” the deity says to Moses in Exodus. “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh, I did not make myself known to them.” While Yahweh’s origins seem shrouded in mystery, by the 9th century, he was the head honcho of both Israel and Palestine-Judah, with Jerusalem its capital. Yahweh was considered their national God, with a number of other gods worshipped as well. One of the more favored ones was Yahweh’s wife, Asherah, the goddess. There is no doubt about this, as we have inscriptions from the 8th century BCE from worshippers desiring blessings from “Yahweh and his Asherah.”
In fact, the origins of her name hint at her previous identity. Asherah in Hebrew is derived from Athirat, a title used in the ancient city of Ugarit for the divine matriarch and El’s companion. It appears that in assuming the mantle of his legendary predecessor El, Yahweh also contained his spouse, which would be his mom. Later scribes go on the warpath to trash the goddess by demoting her outside of heaven forever. The fall of the Queen of Heaven seems to show a shift away from state-sponsored polytheism, set off by the Assyrian destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Babylonians’ wrath against Judah. Yahweh, the warrior deity, failed to protect his people, forcing the elite scribes to rationalize Yahweh’s absence due to the sins of human devotees. This all may come as a shock for many hearing this for the first time, but the theological baggage people bring to the text of the Bible seriously stops them from seeing these texts, as well as the outside archaeological and historical evidence, for what it really is. Remember, the texts of the Bible were never intended to be valid accounts of the actual past. These texts do not even agree with themselves on several issues, portraying competing ideologies at times. Dr. Stavrakopoulou says it well: “Despite the theological changes wrought by the emergence of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, the one aspect of this deity that remained unchanged was his corporeality. By virtue of having a body, he endured as a powerful social agent in the lives of his worshippers across the centuries of the Bible’s formation.” In exploring the body of this ancient deity as his worshippers imagined him, we can access their world; we can meet the real God of the Bible, grounded.
Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou visited a temple in Northern Syria around 2010 at Ain Dara, which was remarkable. She describes it as a gateway to heaven with massive, mighty lions with teeth and claws revealed, guarding the entrance. This temple is the abode of a forgotten God, which was honored by the Syro-Hittites, who were remarkably similar to the ancient Israelites and Judah sites. It looks close to the description of Solomon’s Temple from the Bible. She describes being barefoot, approaching this sacred space, and witnessing the massive footprints of this deity. Her book is worth the purchase just for her breathtaking description of her experience here. It becomes clear: while this God has been long forgotten, their bodily presence was not forgotten, evident by those enormous footprints entering its eternal residence inside, with no exiting tracks anywhere. The picture of this landscape helps bring to life what the ancients understood when they thought of the divine. These gods must be present in some tangible form. These footprints of the God express what it means to be human as well as divine.
The footprint has lasting impressions in culture, as much then as it does today. We take imprints of our newborn babies’ feet or have footprints of celebrities in California’s Hollywood Boulevard. The footprints of Australopithecus afarensis, some of our earliest bipedal hominid ancestors, captured in volcanic ash over 3 million years ago in Laetoli, Northern Tanzania—these prints are more than mere image but bring to life the presence of the whole body. All around the world, people have been fascinated by stories of gods and magical creatures leaving their footprints on Earth, from ancient rock art in Scandinavia and Britain to the sacred island of the Incas in Lake Titicaca. These footprints are found in many places and hold great significance for different cultures. For instance, in southern Botswana, a giant hunter named Matsieng is said to have left his mark near a water hole. These footprints are not only interesting but also important in the rituals and traditions of various communities across history. Some of the oldest stories come from the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. The Greek writer Herodotus told of huge footprints left by the hero Heracles, while in Egypt, the goddess Isis supposedly left her footprints all over the place, along with her partner, Serapis. One of the most famous footprints is on a mountain in Sri Lanka, where people from different religions see it differently: Hindus see it as a footprint of Shiva, Buddhists as Buddha’s, Muslims as Adam’s, and Christians as St. Thomas’s. Even in Jerusalem, there is a rock with a footprint that is claimed by both Muslims and Christians; Muslims believe it belongs to Muhammad, while Christians think it’s Jesus’s. Whether these footprints are natural, made up, or part of ritual ancient practices, they show how people across the world have always felt a connection between the divine and our Earth.
The feet of the gods are extremely important. This goes for the biblical portrayal of God as well. Francesca expresses this to be the case for Adam and Eve hearing Yahweh’s steps coming closer in the garden. When Moses first lays eyes on his God, he sees God standing on a magical rock in the wilderness: “Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire as clear as the sky itself. Yet he did not reach out with his hand against the nobles of the sons of Israel, and they saw God, and they ate and drank.”
Once the story moves to Jerusalem, God makes sure you know where his feet are at. It’s all over the place in the Bible: “The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary, and I will make the place of my feet glorious.” God’s feet smash the bodies of his enemies; they make the Earth rumble with each step into the desert; his feet cause mountains to split. Humans have lost touch with the ground and our feet through evolution, thanks to the invention of boots, chairs, pavements, and motorized vehicles, which have separated us from the Earth. The ancients were far more grounded; their gods were also very grounded. Their presence was often depicted by standing stones across the Levant. While the exact function of these standing stones is not certain, from around 3,100 to 2,000 BCE, during the early Bronze Age, by the middle Bronze Age, standing stones were identified with extraordinary beings like gods, ancestors who were deified, and other supernatural powers. This continued all the way into the Iron Age. Check out this image of standing stones from ancient Gezer in the foothills of the ancient Judean mountains. In ancient times, standing stones were a common sight in places of worship dedicated to Yahweh, the God of the Israelites. These stones could be found both within city temples and in outdoor holy areas. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of these stones, showing that they were an important part of religious practice. Some of these stones have been around for a very long time, standing as silent witnesses to the devotion of a people who viewed their God not as an abstract spirit in the ether, but as a being who walked the very same dust and stone that they did.
This physicality is, in many ways, the most jarring aspect for the modern reader. We are so accustomed to the Hellenistic, philosophical God—the unmoved mover, the pure act—that the God of the Hebrew Bible feels almost like a character in an epic, a being defined by his interactions, his physical manifestations, and his visceral reactions to the world. And yet, this is exactly what makes the text so human, so resonant, and so powerful. When the Bible describes God walking in the garden, or standing on a pavement of sapphire, or dwelling within a temple made of cedar and stone, it is projecting the very human need to locate the divine within the familiar. We want to know where the divine is. We want to see his footprints in the ash. We want to feel the ground shake when he moves. This is the hallmark of a religion that is deeply intertwined with the geography and the physical realities of the people who practiced it.
The transition from this robust, physical deity to the more abstract God of later traditions is a slow and fascinating process. It involves a stripping away of the body, a refining of the deity into something that can exist outside of time and space, something that doesn’t need a temple, or a wife, or a specific plot of land to be “real.” But in doing so, we lose some of the raw, unfiltered humanity that makes the original texts so vital. When we read of Yahweh as a storm God, as a warrior with a family, as a being who could be “seen” by the elders on a mountaintop, we aren’t just reading ancient mythology; we are reading the documentation of a people’s attempt to reconcile the immense, overwhelming power of the natural world with their own desire for connection and understanding.
This is why Dr. Stavrakopoulou’s work is so crucial. She isn’t just analyzing the text for its theological implications; she is performing an autopsy on the very concept of God in the ancient world, looking at the anatomy of belief itself. By examining the physical metaphors, the ritual practices, and the archaeological remains, she brings us back to a time when God was not a philosopher’s abstraction, but a living, breathing, acting agent in history. It is a perspective that is both illuminating and challenging, forcing us to strip away our own modern assumptions and look, really look, at the God of the Bible as he was perceived by those who walked with him, wrestled with him, and built temples to house his feet.
As we continue to dig into the layers of the past, both in the texts and in the earth, we find that the more we learn about these ancient deities, the more we learn about ourselves. The gods we create—or the ways we understand the divine—are always a reflection of our own hopes, our own fears, our own structures, and our own limitations. Whether we are looking at the footprint of an ancient hominid or the described silhouette of a storm God, we are essentially looking into a mirror. We are trying to find ourselves in the infinite, trying to make the divine manageable, tangible, and real. And that is a human journey that has not changed in over three million years.
The further we explore, the more we realize that the “real” God of the Bible, in its original context, is far more complex, far more interesting, and far more human than we have been led to believe. It is a story of power, of family, of war, and of profound, desperate love. It is a story that has been told and retold, revised and edited, but at its heart, it remains a story about a God who wanted to be present, who wanted to be near, who wanted to be felt—a God who, above all else, left his mark on the world. And as we trace those marks, as we follow those footprints across the shifting sands of history, we find ourselves standing right where those ancient worshippers stood: at the threshold of the divine, trying to make sense of a world that is as beautiful, as terrifying, and as mysterious as the God who supposedly walked it.
The journey into the past is not just an academic exercise; it is a way of reclaiming a lost dimension of the human experience. It reminds us that our search for meaning, our search for something greater than ourselves, is a deep, ancient, and profoundly physical act. It is written in the stones, it is sung in the prayers, and it is etched into the very anatomy of the divine. As we close this chapter of our exploration, let us carry with us the understanding that the God of the Bible, in all his physicality and all his mystery, was once a being as real to his people as the breath in their lungs. And perhaps, by understanding that, we can learn to appreciate the complexity of our own relationship with the concepts of the divine that we hold today.
This is the legacy of the ancient Near East: a world where the lines between heaven and earth were thin, where the divine was always just a step away, always leaving a footprint, always waiting for us to notice. It is a legacy that continues to shape our world, our literature, our art, and our lives, long after the temples have fallen and the priests have gone silent. It is a story that, in the end, belongs to all of us—the story of the human attempt to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite, between the seen and the unseen, between the physical and the metaphysical. It is a story that, as long as we keep digging, as long as we keep questioning, will never truly be finished.
