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compassion when Moses stands up for the people, and He remains faithful to His promise even through long periods when Israel seems undeserving of His love. Having to deal with mortals as His only love partners, God is ever learning what it is to be the parent of a wayward child or the husband of an unfaithful wife. A deity who had other outlets for relationship might well have given up on humans. Only One who is otherwise quite wholly and intolerably alone can be counted on to remain engaged in the enterprise of divine/human intimacy forever, no matter how hard it gets. Thus it happens that relationship, modeled on multiple forms of human interpersonal intimacy, forms the essential subject of biblical myth and becomes the essential truth of Jewish and Western religious life.

Metaphor and Divine Personhood

Here we necessarily open ourselves to a broader question. To what extent are all our humanlike images of God projections from the realm of human experience? The inevitable answer is that they indeed are, and the theologian does best who admits fully that such is the case.15 Of course, the person of faith is tempted to turn the picture around, suggesting that the complexity of human personality simply reflects our own creation in God's image, and that it is God, rather than humans, who is to be seen as the primary figure of this similitude. The hall of mirrors may indeed be approached from either end, as the mystics have always understood so well. But the ancient rabbis already seem to have admitted that our images of God change according to the needs of the hour. When God appeared to Israel at the Sea of Reeds, said the rabbis, as the people confronted the advancing Egyptian armies, “He appeared to them as a youth.” On the day of battle one has no use for a tottering old God. But at Sinai, in giving the Law, “He appeared as an elder.” Who wants to receive laws from a mere youth of a God? On the day of lawgiving, only an elder would do.16 The word “appeared” (nire'ah) in this Midrash of perhaps the third to fifth centuries, is a passive form, and it is tellingly unclear whether the text means that God willfully changed His appearance in accord with the people's needs or whether they just saw Him in multiple ways, reflected in the variable lens of their own needs and desires.

The God of Hebrew Scripture is both elusive and concrete, unknowable and yet firmly anchored in images of divine personhood. Even Moses, the most enlightened of all prophets, is not given a true understanding of divinity. When he is about to go into Egypt to redeem Israel, he asks of the voice that addresses him: “If they say ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Ex. 3:13). God's answer is at once a self-revelation and a rebuff: “My name is Y-H-W-H— Being—and I shall be whatever I shall be.” In effect God takes God's own name, the mysterious and precious noun by which He is evoked, back to its verbal root. He then conjugates Himself, as though to say: “If you think you understand me, if you think you've got Me in the little box of nominal definition, I'll show you how I can fly away again.” God's answer to Moses’ request is something like the slap of a Zen master. This is the One who later again turns down Moses’ “Show me Your glory,” reminding him that “No man shall see Me and live” (Ex. 33:18-20). This is the God of whom the prophet says: “To whom may you liken Me that I be compared?” and “What image would you attribute to Him?” (Is. 40:18, 25).

All of this abstraction and questioning of images, newly central to the religious language of Scripture, exists side by side with a host of images for God, most of them taken over directly from the religious world that had long existed, in which gods are regularly portrayed as bearing a form similar, but superior, to that of humans. In the pre-Israelite cultures, these were represented artistically as well as verbally, as a great many surviving stone cuttings and bas-reliefs attest. Once the Torah forbade such depictions, only verbal embodiments remained, but these are ubiquitous both in