Thanks for the answer. Even though it sounds like dodging the issue and like you’re not even interested in looking into it.
How is it that you don’t doubt the very un-scholarly speculation called Judaism or the Hebrew Bible?

I assume that before you formed your worldview, you went through all the arguments about the universe and all the religions in it, and only then decided. Lucky you. For me it’s a bit hard to go through everything, so I choose for myself what seems to have interesting and relevant potential and is worth investing in, and what does not, and I make decisions based on partial information. That is the fate of ordinary human beings who aren’t supermen. From my a priori familiarity with these flimsy and shaky fields, I think it isn’t worth much investment. We’re talking about a lot of speculation with a very weak basis. It is certainly possible that I’m wrong, especially regarding a specific topic, but what can you do. Our time is finite.
If for some reason this seems interesting and relevant to you, that’s of course completely legitimate. To each his own taste and reasoning. In that case, you are of course welcome to look into it further and consult people who deal with this. There are quite a few of them, and you certainly don’t need me. You can contact, for example, M who appears here on the site, or on the site “Ladaat Lehaamin,” “Ratio,” and the like.
Good luck,

As far as I understand, the difference between monotheism and polytheism is not a quantitative difference but a qualitative one. (I saw this somewhere, don’t remember where.) In monotheism (at least in Judaism’s version), God is outside the cosmos, and that seems to me to be the difference.

Besides, can you give some sources for what you’re saying? True, the word Elohim sounds like a plurality of gods, so what?

A Psalm of Asaph:
God stands in the divine assembly; in the midst of the judges He judges.
How long will you judge unjustly, and show favor to the wicked? Selah.
Judge the poor and orphan; vindicate the afflicted and needy.
Rescue the poor and destitute; save them from the hand of the wicked.
They do not know, nor do they understand; they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I said, “You are divine beings, all of you sons of the Most High.”
Yet you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You shall inherit all the nations.

Asaf — I know the subject well and have read most of the scholarly material on it. In my opinion it’s really mistaken. If you want us to go into the details — we can.

A transcendent God is a late conception. Until Maimonides there were quite a few who believed in a God with a body, or with some kind of corporeality. And the Raavad testifies to this when he wrote that many greater than he (Maimonides) believed this.

And what about Onkelos and Philo, who didn’t believe in a God with a body?

I didn’t say that according to ancient Judaism’s conception God necessarily has a body, only that this was not a necessary belief and many interpreted Him as indeed having a body.
Besides, Onkelos and Philo were also influenced by the Greek conception.

Onkelos is the earliest commentator we have. I don’t know whether many interpreted it that way; it may be that such a conception existed among the people, but I don’t think it was the majority. Maimonides was not the first to say this. You can argue that everyone was really influenced by the Greeks, but those are speculations and nice stories, not facts.

Onkelos is a commentator; the plain meaning of the Hebrew Bible is what the text itself presents, and there there is clear anthropomorphism. In addition, even among the Sages there are anthropomorphic statements, so I think one can assume that an anthropomorphic approach existed among quite a few people.
The Raavad himself testifies that many held this way, and argues that it is not a fundamental article of faith.
There is evidence that the Karaites adopted the approach of a transcendent God earlier as a fundamental belief. There is evidence that the Karaites were influenced by Greek philosophers, and likewise the Christians and Muslims, who changed their approach to divinity quite a lot in the first centuries of the Common Era (and again, among them too there were different approaches regarding anthropomorphism).
What I’m saying is that different approaches existed, but the conception of a transcendent God as a foundational belief and article of faith arrived in a later period. Before that, quite a few believed in anthropomorphism.
And I also didn’t claim that the belief was necessarily Greek, only that the approach of the Greek philosophers contributed to adopting the transcendent conception as a foundational belief.

With Heaven’s help, eve of the holy Sabbath, Vayera, 5781

Anthropomorphism is explicitly rejected in the Torah, which says, “For you saw no form,” and therefore Onkelos was careful to translate every expression that could, Heaven forbid, imply anthropomorphism in a way that rules out such an understanding.

For example: “And the Lord appeared to him” — “And the Lord was revealed to him”; “I will go down now and see” — “I will now be revealed and judge”; “and if not, I will know” — “and if not, I will exact punishment from them”; “And the Lord went” — “and His glory departed”; “God is with you” — “the word of the Lord is your help”; “The Lord will see” — “before the Lord, generations will worship here”; “By Myself I have sworn” — “By My word I have established.”

The Greeks in the time of the Sages were steeped in idolatry, and even their philosophers were no exception. Although the philosophy that tried to explain everything by means of scientific lawfulness did contribute to abandoning the idolatrous myths.

In the days of the Second Temple and after it, there was great Jewish influence on Greek and Roman culture, and many from “high society” converted or at least drew close to Judaism, to the point that a Roman writer complained that “in Rome there is no house without a Jew in it.” Hadrian’s decrees against circumcision came to prevent this strong Jewish influence. So if one finds monotheistic voices in Greco-Roman culture, that is Jewish influence.

The Raavad agrees completely with Maimonides that anthropomorphism contradicts the Torah, but he does not accept Maimonides’ stringent attitude, which sees those who err in this as heretics, since they are inadvertent sinners who erred because of “aggadic passages that confuse people’s beliefs” — that is, they mistakenly understood metaphorical descriptions in the words of the Sages literally. So it is clear from the Raavad’s words that anthropomorphism is a “distortion of thought.”

Best regards, Y. B. T. Levi

Paragraph 5, line 2
… since, in the Raavad’s view, they are considered “inadvertent,” having erred because…

The Raavad said that people greater than Maimonides fell into this. That means not only ignoramuses fell into it.
The Greek philosophers rejected all anthropomorphism, and some of them were accused because of this of heresy. Greek influence, among other things, led to the pushing aside of polytheism and the rise of Christianity.
In the Bible and in the words of the Sages there is quite a bit of anthropomorphism. Moses, for example, saw God’s back.

With Heaven’s help, eve of the holy Sabbath, “And the Lord appeared to Abraham,” 5781

To David — greetings,

From the very place where you imagined you found “anthropomorphism” comes proof to the contrary. Moses asks his God, “Please make known to me Your ways, that I may find favor in Your eyes”; thus Moses is asking to know the ways of the Creator’s governance, and if so it is clear that “the face of the Lord” and “His back” are metaphorical expressions for the ways of divine governance.

The Greeks saw a tangible example in every city and village of a religion that worships an abstract God, in whose Temple there is no statue, and there was one and only one religion that strictly forbade making statues of divinity on the grounds that “you saw no form” — and that religion is Judaism. The Greek philosophers went “one step further” and neutralized God even from involvement and revelation in the world, and in that they spoiled the broth.

The “patent” on the idea of a God “without form” is registered and documented in the Bible, and was practiced in actual fact in every Jewish “miniature sanctuary,” and it had great influence on the Greco-Roman world, until there were writers who complained that “there is no house in Rome without a Jew in it,” so the “copyright” on the idea of an abstract God cannot be denied to Judaism.

Best regards, Y. B. T. Levi

I think this goes back to the question of Torah from Heaven. If Torah from Heaven is really true, then it cannot be that the Hebrew Bible means anthropomorphism. Even if it’s just one author and there is no Torah from Heaven, it’s hard to say that everything is a corporeal description of God, since there are many contradictory descriptions, so apparently these are metaphors for modes of revelation.
One of the Karaite attacks against the Pharisees-Orthodox was over the claim that we supposedly made God corporeal. They attacked the book Shiur Komah, which Maimonides said it is a commandment to burn, and Rabbeinu Hai Gaon said that if the book is meant literally then it is heresy, and many others came out against the book. Here it already comes to trusting the Sages. Trusting the Sages does not mean that the Sages were always right, but believing that the Sages were wise. And if they really were wise, then they could not have come to the conclusion that God has a body.
In the end, all the written literature of the Oral Torah is after the influence of the Greeks, so how do you determine whether non-anthropomorphism is a result of Greek belief or not?