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matters (Judg. 5:23; 1 Kings 22:20–23; Isa. 63:3–5); etc. 7
    Having a male body, Yahweh was believed to have male body parts. This also means sexual organs (i.e., “loins,” Ezek. 1:27–28). Texts such as Genesis 6:4, where the gods come to have intercourse with female humans, assume as much, as does the New Testament discreet divine visitation of the teenage virgin Mary. In historical research and biblical archaeology it is commonly accepted that we have evidence that a goddess was worshipped in ancient Israel as Yahweh's consort (Asherah). 8 But the groups that were responsible for the final text of the Old Testament made sure few traces of the goddess remained, which resulted in a very sexist scenario in which heaven is an all-male world. The closest one gets to how Yahweh would relate to a goddess is when Yahweh calls Israel or the cities in the land his wife/bride (as in Ezekiel and Hosea). Looking at how he treats his spouse, however, shows us an all-too-human mind prone to domestic violence and emotional abuse, despite whatever more positive and affectionate character traits Yahweh as husband is depicted as displaying. 9
    But there is more that reveals absurdity in the text, and it concerns something more pedantic but often overlooked in discussions of the body of Yahweh, and that is God as a language user. God just happens to have a Hebrew name, Yahweh, a fact that seems peculiar to few believers who still pray in the name of their god without wondering why this is so important or why he needs one (one can just call him “God”). In addition, according to the text, we have to take seriously the assumption that at the creation of the heavens and the earth (why does a god want to create stuff?) even before northwestern Semitic languages evolved (of which Hebrew is one), Yahweh spoke the world into being via a particular dialect of classical Hebrew that evolved among humans, stayed around only for a short time in a local bit of human history, and then vanished everywhere except from heaven. But think about it: at the moment God initially speaks at creation, the story makes little sense at all. When God says “Let there be light!” in classical Hebrew, there is nobody for whom what God utters is language rather than just a wordless shout. There is no community of speakers for whom what God cries amounts to an imperative, a command that requires something to happen. So how does God know what to say, and how can he be sure what he utters is a meaningful language with a certain force? There could not have been any established social conventions at creation, there is only our own projection in order to describe a bit of divine behavior as a certain type of action, as distinct from reflex twitches and meaningless gesticulations. The idea of a language user who is conscious as a speaker of classical Hebrew all by himself for all eternity makes no sense at all. 10
    Few readers through the ages have picked up this problem, and those who did soon resorted to philosophical-theological reinterpretation. Many medieval Jewish authorities maintained that Hebrew was the language of God without ever being bothered by the question of why God should speak a particular, historically temporal, and culturally specific dialect of classical Hebrew. Part of this dilemma for the logistics of creation by word was recognized in 1851 when German philologist Jacob Grimm argued that if God spoke language, indeed any language that involves dental consonants, God must have teeth, and since teeth were created not for speech but for eating, it would follow that he also eats, which led to so many other undesirable assumptions for those with theological preferences that the idea was abandoned altogether. 11
    This worry is certainly anachronistic inasmuch as Genesis 1 assumes humans are theomorphic rather than God being anthropomorphic. The latter is surely naive from an evolutionary perspective, and nowadays mainstream biblical scholars do not