The homosexuality of the god who pretended to be god: Yahweh

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Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, whose book, God’s Phallus, I highly recommend, is Associate Professor and Director of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University and an ordained rabbi.

His book isn’t fluff or fringy but flush with scholarly reference and holy revere.Yet, it will stun and madden those who hold the Jewish god, Yahweh, in high regard.

And it has provided a kind of imprimatur to my 1976 published The Biblical Paradigm for Homosexuality.

Isaiah reports [46: 5-9] YHWH saying this “ … I am God and there is none else. I am divine, and there is none like me.” [Page 123, Eilberg-Schwartz]

Many scholars consider this a further exclamation that YHWH is the only “god,” something uttered when YHWH met Moses atop Horeb (Mt. Sinai) to provide the Ten Commandments: “I am who am.”

But is that really what YHWH is saying?

I think, if we follow Eilberg Schwartz, that YHWH is trumpeting his uniqueness, surely in Isaiah that’s what he’s doing.

And that uniqueness is one (or all) of three things: his grotesque features, his flawed and noticeable phallic appendage, and his preference for men. (See my publication)

This goes to YHWH leaving his Canaanite family (and perhaps a wife, Asherah, which I’ll get to eventually here). YHWH is an outcast, not forced from the Canaanite pantheon but an odd-man-out, quietly despised perhaps, or forbidden from social intercourse because his sexual practices were outside the norm, even then.

In Exodus 33:18 Moses asks to see [god’s] glory [sic] during his (god’s) visitation with the Israelite hierarchs but YHWH rebuffs Moses and says that during the visitation he (YHWH) state’s [Exodus 33:23], “ … I will take My hand away, and you will see My back, but My face must not be seen.”

Eilberg-Schwartz, noting Janowitz 1992, writes “the fear engendered by a sighting of  God was … regarded as an extraordinary occurrence … but do not seem to explain why the sighting of certain parts of God’s figure were considered more dangerous than others."[Page 76]

“The aversion of the gaze [of God] … also reflects an ambivalence about God’s sex. Specifically, the gaze is averted from precisely those parts of the deity’s body that play a critical role in our judgments about a human figure’s sex, namely the front and face.”

“ … the turning of [God’s] back … symbolically represents a hiding of the very spot by which sexual identification can be confirmed …Surely there are easier ways to hide the face than by turning the whole body around? Might God’s elaborate choreography also hide something else?” [Page 77]

Here I surmise that YHWH is a deformed being, his genitalia part of his grotesquerie that sent him from the Canaanite hearth.

He sought the solace of the Israelite peoples, who were abject and suppressed by their conquered state and ready to adopt a “warrior” to bolster their existence.

YHWH, like shamans of the previous eras, toyed with the needs of the Israelites, using his deformity as an outstanding feature, indicating he was, indeed, a special member, an exalted member of the human race.

There’s more to this, and I’ll offer supporting materials to make the case….

RR