It has been said, mostly by critics of Judaism, that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a vengeful God. Unfortunately, that anti-Jewish simplification undermines an appreciation of how our ancient text captures complex ideas of God. Our ancestors were far more nuanced. The beauty of the text is that it actually captures divergent opinions reflective of the historical circumstances in which the many authors found themselves. Not only do different books of the text offer different interpretations, but there are variations even within those books, sometimes from chapter to chapter, verse to verse.
Each of the first two chapters of Genesis, in fact, present very different understandings of God. The first chapter’s God is fully transcendent, a disembodied God that forms the world with speech alone. This chapter’s author imagined a non-physical, distant entity that set time in motion and stepped back to watch creation unfold.
The second chapter of Genesis imagines God as a being that moves through the Garden of Eden, physically shapes human beings from clay, and engages Adam and Eve in conversation. In many ways, it’s reflective of the Greek and Roman myths where deities walk among humans and affect their lives directly through their actions or through their squabbles and wagers with their fellow gods and demigods. Of course, the Bible’s God is hardly as petty as the gods of the Greeks and Romans, and one of God’s dominant characteristics is God’s aloneness and determination to establish a moral order.
As you imagine God, is God transcendent—fully other and beyond—or is God immanent—within us and as “close to us as breathing” as the poet has written?
—Rabbi Ron Stern