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The Torah of Moses:
Judaism in the BibleWho is the God to whom Jews offered their sacrifices and prayers? In
the polytheistic world of antiquity most worshippers placed much
emphasis on ensuring that they named correctly the deity with whom
they wished to establish relations. By contrast, the God of the Jews was
sometimes seen as mysteriously hard to pin down, so that the philoso-
pher Plutarch in the first century ce wrote a treatise on the subject (in
which he concluded, from the nature of Jewish worship, that it was
most likely that the Jewish God was Dionysus, the Greek god of wine).
For Jews themselves, identifying God in prayer was simple: he was the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose story is told in the Bible.^1
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ God is
portrayed in the Bible as the supreme ruler of the universe, creator of all
things through his words, judge and lawgiver of all mankind, subject to
no constraints from natural laws or competing cosmic forces. In con-
trast to the myths of other peoples in the Near East and classical world,
the Jews did not tell cosmological stories to explain the origins of the
divinity they worshipped. His power is simply assumed. God is often
stated to be intangible and too holy for humans to view, but this does
not prevent him being imagined as father, shepherd, judge or king: ‘the
Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king
forever.’ Anthropomorphic imagery was encouraged by the notion in
the early chapters of Genesis that man and woman were created in the
image of God, but other images are also found, most notably God as the
sun, shining forth with bright light: the Psalmist called his God ‘a sun
and shield’.^2
God was referred to by a number of names, titles and epithets which
are likely to have accreted gradually, as different notions about God
were consolidated. In the prayer ascribed to Solomon on the dedication
of the First Temple, he asks whether God (elohim in Hebrew) will indeed
dwell on earth, since ‘even heaven and the highest heaven cannot