It seems that the
problem of God’s visibility is invariably linked to the question of God’s
corporeality, which, in turn, is bound up with the matter of human likeness to
God. . . . Although the official cult of ancient Israelite religion prohibited
the making of images or icons of God, this basic need to figure or image God in
human form found expression in other ways, including the prophetic vision of God
as an anthropos, as well as the basic tent of the similitude of man and
divinity. The biblical conception is such that the Anthropos is as much cast in
the image of God as God is cast in the image of the anthropos. This is stated in
the very account of the creation of the human being in the first chapter of
Genesis (attributed to P) in the claim that Adam was created in the image of
God. (E. R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination
in Medieval Jewish Mysticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994],
20, cited in Andrei Orlov, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in
Heaven Traditions and Early Christology [Jewish and Christian Texts in
Context and Related Studies 31; London: T&T Clark, 2019], 12)
