The God of the biblical canon also has a dangerously luminous and fiery
body, called in some sources his כבוד, kābôd. In the priestly material
(P and Ezekiel) in particular, כבוד יהוה kābôd yhweh denotes Yahweh’s
radiant human form, “with the strongest possible emphasis on God as light.” (TDNT
2:241) The fire that emanates from כבוד יהוה is dangerous: it consumes whatever
it touches. Like the pulhu melammu of the Mesopotamian deities,
the flames of the כבוד יהוה can be unleased on Yahweh’s enemies. To look upon כבוד
יהוה was deadly: the brightness was too much for the mortal eye. To abide with Israel,
but not consume her, Yahweh, like the Homeric and Hesiodic deities, cloaks his
fiery כבוד with a black could (חשׁך/ ערפל). When Yahweh wants
to visit wrath on an enemy or punish one of his own, he thrusts aside the cloud,
exposing them to his undimmed radiance. (E.g. Num. 16:19, 20:16) (W. Wesley
Williams, “Tajallī
wa-Ru-ya: A Study of Anthropomorphic Theophany
and the Visio Dei in the Hebrew Bible,
the Qur’ān and Early Sunnī Islam” [PhD Thesis; The University of
Michigan, 2008], 38-40)
. . . A number of scholars have sought to distance Ezekiel’s
anthropomorphic kābôd from P’s ‘abstract” kābôd (e.g., Israel
Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: the Priestly Torah and the Holiness School.
[Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995], 128-137). Eichrodt, Theology, 2:32
understood P’s kābôd to be “a formless brightness of light” and
Morgensttern, “Biblical Theophanies,” 1:154 assumed that the kābôd Jahwe of
P, other than being ‘something like fire’ enveloped in the ‘cloud of Jahwe’, has
no particular shape” (See also Schmid, “Gottesbild, 251”: Yahweh’s fire was amorph.)
But these claims are based on the false assumption that P’s theology is
ant-anthropomorphism, an assumption which is to be rejected (see above).
Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, 200f. is surely correct:
“Corporeal representation of the Deity in the Priestly document found its
clearest expression in the conception of the ‘Glory of God’, against which the
book of the document found its clearest expression in the conception of the ‘Glory
of God’, against which the book of Deuteronomy promulgated its doctrine of ‘God’s
Name.’ The underlying imagery of the concept of God’s Glory (כבוד יהוה), ‘the kabod
of Yahweh,’ embedded in Priestly tradition is drawn from corporeal and not
abstract terms.” See also Wolfson, Through a Speculum (23 n. 55): “while
it is fair enough to contrast Ezekiel’s depiction of the glory with that of the
Priestly authorship it seems to me that the anthropomorphic understanding of
the glory is not completely innovated by Ezekiel. Indeed, the narrative in
Exod. 33:18ff. already suggests such a conception.” (Ibid., 38-39 n. 176)
