While discussing the Old Testament conception of God as being embodied, Christopher Stead wrote the following which will be of interest to Latter-day Saints:
The common belief that God has his dwelling in the heavens goes along with the belief that he has a form like that of a man—a male, of course—which is easily deduced from Genesis 1:26-27, and it implied by numerous references to his ‘throne’, his ‘footstool’, his ‘face’, his ‘hands’ and the like. In the primitive period this belief is uncomplicated; thus in Genesis 18 three ‘men’ appear to Abraham: two of them go to Sodom (19:1) while the third remains speaking with Abraham and is identified as Jahweh. The description of God sitting at a table with Abraham of course implies that God is—or can appear to be—the same size as a man; though later texts reflecting on God’s cosmic power imagine him as enormously large (e.g. Isa. 40:12-15). There are indeed ‘aniconic’ texts which deny him any form, such as Deuteronomy 4:12, 15, 16: ‘you heard a voice speaking [on Sinai], but you saw no figure; . . . therefore do not make any carved figure, whether in human or animal form’. But more generally the idols are condemned, not as having hands or mouths, but as unable to use them; the very familiar attacks on them in Psalm 115:4 ff. (= Ps. 135:15 ff.) hardly suggests that the true God has no eyes or mouth! (Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 100-1, italics in original)
