There is some evidence, from perhaps
as early as the first century AD, for a quite literal Jewish belief in the bodily
form of God. The “most clearly anthropomorphic, or rather, macrocosmic
conceptions of the deity in late antique Judaism” are to be found, Stroumsa maintains,
in Shi’ur Qomah (“Measurement of the Stature”), a Jewish mystical text
which catalogues the size of the limbs of the divine body. (Gedaliahu G.
Stroumsa, "Form(s)
of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ," HTR 76 [1983] 276)
Dating of the work is difficult, but Stroumsa thinks that the “original Jewish speculation
on the macrocosmic divine body if pre-Chrisitan.” (Stroumsa, “Form(s) of God,”
277; Jarl E. Fossum, "Jewish-Christian
Christology and Jewish Mysticism," Vigiliae Christianae 37
[1987] 261) Fossum notes that the view of Scholem that there is a reference to
the Shi’ur Qomah doctrine on the shirt version of the highly syncretistic
and undateable 2 Enoch: “You, you see the extent of my body, the same as your
own; but I, I have seen the extent of the LORD, without measure and without
analogy, who has no end” (2 En. A 39:6). (Fossum, “Christology,” 261, claiming
that the work “in all probability is pre-Christian” . . . ) The
Pseudo-Clementine writings are thought to give expression to an “Ebionite”
doctrine of the divine body. (Fossum, “Christology,” 264-65) God has a “most
beautiful form (morphēn)” and a brilliantly shining “body,” though his
limbs are “solely for the sake of beautify and not for use” (Ps.-Clem. Hom.
17.7). (cf. Ps.-Clem. Hom. 17.10: “beauty cannot exist apart from shape;
nor can one be attracted to the love of God, nor even deem that he can see Him,
if God has no form” [Schaff]) The form of God is perceptible to the pure in heart,
“that they may rejoice because they suffered.” Justin makes reference to
certain Jewish teachers who held that “the Father of all, the unbegotten God,
has hands and feet, and fingers, and a soul, like a composite being; and they
for this reason teach that it was the Father Himself who appeared to Abraham
and to Jacob” (Dial. 114). (Andrew Perriman, In the Form of A God:
The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul [Eugene, Oreg. Cascade
Books, 2022], 103-4)
