Atom Chetcuti
Research Mentor(s): Deborah Forger
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Department of Middle East Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
Presentation Date: 08/03/2022
Presentation Type: Oral presentation
Poster Number:
Session: Session II: 1:30 – 2:20pm
Room: Vandenberg
Authors: Adam Chetcuti and Deborah Forger
Abstract
Since the dawn of religion, God has been viewed in countless ways all over the world. God has
been described as an embodiment of nature, a corporeal being with an embodied form, an
incorporeal being without an embodied form, and everything in between. God’s Bodies in
Ancient Jewish Traditions explores how Jews conceptualized God’s body during the two
centuries before and following the start of the Common Era, the period in which Jesus lived.
Today, many people believe that God is an immaterial being without a physical form, but did
they always believe this? Or did ancient Jews think that God did indeed have a physical body
and that God’s body might also have been anthropomorphic? The Dead Sea Scrolls,
Pseudepigrapha, and Apocrypha, three significant corpora from this era, were examined to
answer this question. This ancient Jewish literature, which predates the modern development of
Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity and includes manuscripts that have been preserved in
Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, offers us a fascinating window into the religious beliefs and
practices of the Jewish of the past. From our research, we contend that anthropomorphic and
non-anthropomorphic views of God were both prevalent among Jews at this period, oftentimes
existing along with one another, but that God almost always is seen as having an embodied
form, even if that form was unfathomable or invisible to us as humans. Analysis of this nature
gives us invaluable insight into the views regarding God’s Body from this tumultuous historical
era that would later grow into Christianity and Modern Judaism, and how much they differ from
modern interpretations.
