The reader who fancies herself or himself to be postmodern is still probably operating out of one of these two options.
Neither of these frameworks would have been familiar to the Hebrew author writing anywhen between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C.
The conceptual pigeon-holes into which the ancient Hebrew slotted his thoughts did not distinguish as sharply and rigidly between physical and metaphysical as does the modern thinker. But the ancient Hebrew would have drawn a more distinct boundary-line between the divine and the worldly than his modern analogue.
Generally, the ancient Hebrew might have been more comfortable with fuzzy and indistinct boundary-lines than 21st-century folks. While the modern reader is inclined to dissect the human being into a physical body on the one hand, and on the other hand into parts which are spiritual, mental, emotional, psychological, and soulful, his Hebrew counterpart might have said that a human being is not a “body and soul” but rather the intersection of body and soul — that “body and soul” are not two parts, like nut and bolt, or like nail and wood, or like shirt and pants, but rather that body and soul are like the flour and sugar in a cake: stirred together, joined with a liquid, and baked into an indivisible unit.
Reaching for another metaphor, it may be said that the ancient Hebrew looked at the human blend of body and soul like the blend of two colors of paint, which the artist mixes on his palette, the black and the white mingled to form a shade of gray, and it would be hopeless to speak of the “white” as somehow distinct from the “black” once the two are mixed.
While the Hebrew therefore made less of a distinction between the physical and the metaphysical, he made perhaps more of a distinction between the divine and the commonplace.
The modern metaphysician calmly adds “God” to the list of other objects which he classifies as “metaphysical” — metaphysical objects include thoughts, ideas, emotions, memories, minds, abstract numbers, geometrical forms, mathematical formulas, angels, demons, etc.
The Hebrew was more inclined to see God as absolutely and utterly apart from other types of existence — from other types of being, or, with Heidegger, from other types of Being — Sein or Dasein.
When the interpretive question is then posed, does Scripture speak of God in an anthropomorphic manner? The answer is a clear and decisive “Yes and No.” As scholar Frank Seilhamer writes,
Much of the Old Testament conceives of God in a highly anthropomorphic fashion. Yahweh is no far-off, abstract idea, but a person who in many ways is much like a man, thought greater, mightier, etc. He is not seen as “absolute Being but as the ‘living God,’ active in this world of time and space … ” Not only is God one who has a body, enabling him to walk in a garden in the “cool of the day,” but he is capable of exhibiting the whole gamut of emotional and psychical states. God can feel anger, hate, love, and mercy and compassion, just as he can be jabbed with sorrow, and even be bargained with. In all, Yahweh is a deity who communicates and feels and acts “personally” with and in his creation.
The Hebrew author was quite comfortable in writing of God using thoroughly human vocabulary. But this does not necessarily imply ‘anthropomorphism’ as the term is often understood. The difference between God and man is not one of metaphysical category, but rather one of spiritual category. All of this will be quite uncomfortable for the metaphysician trained in a cartesian or post-cartesian pattern.
For the ancient Hebrew, God can enjoy a walk in the garden during the cool part of the day while still being utterly different from a human being — especially from a post-Fall human being.
The difference between God and man, in the ancient Hebrew mindset, is not the difference between metaphysical and physical; it is the difference between divine and commonplace, as Seilhamer notes:
This is not to say, however, that there were no essential and basic difference between God and man other than degree in early Hebrew thought. As Aubrey Johnson points out, even in the earliest Biblical records Yahweh, though pictured in the formof a man, was, nevertheless, thought of as a Being of a different substance than the latter.
While the modernist emphasizes the distinction between metaphysical and physical, between mind body — and then comfortably places both ‘mind’ and ‘God’ into a categories which includes a variety of other ‘metaphysical objects’ — the authors of the Tanakh emphasized the distinction between God and everything else.
This is perhaps why most forms of the gnostic heresy had to wait for the Greek conceptual framework to enable their appearances. Gnosticism would not have been intelligible, much less plausible, to the ancient Semites.
Among other Hebrew vocabulary, Seilhamer examines nefesh and basar.
“Though there was nothing in Hebrew thought that made the ‘body’ or ‘flesh’” sinful in and of itself, such a sense of “body” or “flesh” was still somehow incomplete, or not complete enough, to capture the divine presence. Such body or flesh is not “a substance too ‘base’ to be the ‘person’ of the divine,” But it is insufficient to be the fullness of the deity.
“God’s ‘person’ usually was spoken and written of in terms of being of a light and rarefied substance, sometimes explained as being like ‘fire.’” This might perhaps be read as vaguely analogical to, or foreshadowing of, the type of metaphysical objects which appear in the writing of the Descartes or Leibniz — a Platonic idea(l) or an abstraction to which is attributed some ontological reality. But we cannot read the ancient Hebrews as being dualists, or substance dualists, in the sense of the Cartesians and other early modern philosophers. When the early Hebrews describe God as “spirit,” they are not working in the conceptual framework which categorizes things as either physical or metaphysical.
This difference between God and the rest of his creation is pointed up in the well-known oracle of Isaiah uttered by the prophet against his contemporaries who looked to Egypt for help against Assyria.
In Chapter 31, Isaiah notes that “the Egyptians are men and not God, and their horses are flesh and not Spirit.” Perhaps a tentative reconstruction of ancient Hebrew ontology may be ventured. In the juxtaposition of ‘men’ and ‘God’ — and of ‘flesh’ and ‘Spirit’ — Isaiah is not organizing his thought around the early modern distinction between physical and metaphysical. Rather, Isaiah is operating with these two categories: God and everything else.
The “parallelism” in Isaiah “points out the contrast between the substance of God and the substance of his creation.”
In contrast to what he has made God is not “flesh,” he is “Spirit,” and in this sense different in essence from man and animals. It is not that this passage, or ones similar to it, attempt to indict “flesh” as being essentially evil or corrupt. The intent of the text is to show that God is not of the same fragile substance as man. Where man is limited God is not. God is infinitely beyond man in “being,” while continually in communication with man “personally.” God is not an unidentifiable unknowable glob floating around in space! He is a “person.” Yet, while God is a “person” he still is essentially “Spirit.” Therefore, while God can be, and so often is, spoken about in an anthropomorphic framework, it must never be forgotten that for the early Hebrews at least God’s psychical functions have a “Spiritual” basis in contrast to man, whose psychical functions have a physical basis.
The 21st-century reader must therefore be careful not to read into these words — spirit, soul, body, flesh, etc. — a modern ontology.
