The God of the Hebrew Bible walks through a garden, speaks with Moses face to face, stretches out a hand, and descends from heaven to investigate human affairs. He remembers promises, regrets decisions, burns with anger, and grieves over the conduct of those He created, and the same scriptures that record these portraits also record His declaration that He is God and a different order of being from any mortal, that the heavens are too small to hold Him, and that every image falls short of His likeness. The biblical writers place these portraits side by side, frequently within a single passage, and they show every sign of finding the arrangement entirely natural.
Later Jewish and Christian theologians found the arrangement a rich philosophical problem. If God possesses perfect knowledge, what can remembering mean for Him? If His purposes are eternal, how can He regret an earlier decision? If He is incorporeal, in what sense does He walk, see, or extend a hand? And if His nature is immutable, meaning that His essential being remains constant, what should readers make of the extraordinary emotional vocabulary of the prophets? Interpreters have pursued these questions for more than two thousand years, and their answers trace the development of Jewish and Christian theology, especially the relationship between the Hebrew Scriptures and the philosophical traditions through which they were later read.
This article begins with the Hebrew itself, where a pattern emerges that organizes much of what follows. In Hosea 11 God’s declaration of His own divinity arrives at the climax of His most tender speech and gives the reason for His mercy toward Israel, so that divine otherness grounds divine compassion. The philosophical traditions that took up these texts shared the conviction of divine transcendence and drew from it a different consequence, a reason to interpret the emotional language in more abstract terms. The history of Jewish and Christian interpretation can be followed through the working out of those two logics, with translators, rabbis, philosophers, mystics, and modern theologians each contributing a distinct emphasis, and with the rabbinic image of a weeping God and the twentieth-century theology of divine pathos returning to the logic of Hosea.
Regret and Constancy Share a Root
Genesis 6:6 contains one of the most arresting descriptions of God in the Torah, and it arrives at the end of a narrative that traces the growth of human wickedness through several generations, so that the reader meets the divine response with the full weight of everything that precedes it. The verse itself follows.
“And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Genesis 6:6)
Two Hebrew verbs carry the emotional weight of the verse. The first, nacham (נָחַם), conveys regret, relenting, or consolation depending upon its grammatical form and context, and English must choose among these meanings where the Hebrew holds them in one root; the NRSVue chooses “sorry” in this verse, and the Jewish Publication Society translation chooses “regretted.” The second verb, atsav (עָצַב), conveys pain, sorrow, or distress, here in a construction that directs the grief toward the divine heart. Genesis 6:5 describes the continual inclination of the human heart toward evil, and the following verse sets the corrupted human heart beside a sorrowful divine heart, so that the narrative joins the two in a relationship of striking intimacy. The text describes a divine response to human corruption that issues in the announcement of judgment, and it leaves the question of what God knew in advance to the reader’s reflection.
The difficulty sharpens in 1 Samuel 15, where God declares that He regrets having made Saul king because Saul has turned away from His commandments (1 Samuel 15:11), and where Samuel announces that the Glory of Israel holds to the judgment against Saul, “for he is not a mortal, that he should change his mind” (1 Samuel 15:29). The chapter closes by repeating that God regretted making Saul king (1 Samuel 15:35), and all three statements employ the Hebrew root nacham, so that a single narrative holds God’s regret, God’s steadfastness, and God’s regret again within a few verses.
Context supplies a plausible resolution. God’s regret concerns Saul’s disobedience and the kingship bestowed upon him, while Samuel’s declaration concerns the finality of the judgment that removes Saul, so that regret over a past act and constancy in a present decision occupy different logical places. The passage shows that the Hebrew authors felt free to set language of divine responsiveness beside language of divine difference from human beings, and that nacham covers a range that includes regret over what has occurred and relenting from an announced course of action. The interpretive task therefore begins with the Hebrew word, and the philosophical questions follow from it.
Remembrance Opens the Way to Deliverance
Another recurring expression is divine remembrance. Following the Flood, Genesis 8:1 announces that God remembered Noah, using the verb zakhar (זָכַר), commonly translated “remember.” In ordinary English, remembering frequently implies recovering information that has escaped one’s attention, whereas biblical Hebrew employs the verb across a wider range that includes bringing something to mind, acknowledging a relationship, and acting in accordance with an established commitment. The context of the verse is instructive, since immediately after God remembers Noah the narrative describes a wind passing over the earth and the waters beginning to recede, and divine remembrance introduces the movement from judgment toward deliverance.
A similar pattern appears in Exodus 2:24-25, where God hears Israel’s groaning and remembers His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and where the following verse adds that God saw the Israelites and knew. The passage gathers four verbs ordinarily associated with human experience, hearing, remembering, seeing, and knowing, into a single movement toward the Exodus, and remembering sits at the center of that movement and expresses covenantal faithfulness. The verb zakhar retains its ordinary sense of remembrance, and within these narratives the remembrance becomes consequential through the actions that follow it.
Jewish liturgy preserves this association. The Zikhronot, or Remembrances, prayers of Rosh Hashanah invoke God’s remembrance of creation, humanity, and covenant, and they appeal to the divine faithfulness that remembrance expresses. Later philosophical interpreters would explain such language through divine omniscience, observing that God’s knowledge is free of the limits that make human forgetting possible. The biblical narratives themselves open with a more immediate concern, the relationship among remembrance, covenant, and deliverance, and they invite the reader to begin there before reaching for an abstract theory of divine knowledge.
Otherness Grounds Compassion
Divine remembrance raises questions about knowledge, and divine compassion raises a more searching question about emotion. The Hebrew root racham (רָחַם) expresses compassion or mercy, and its related forms include rachamim, compassion, and rechem, womb. The linguistic relationship evokes an intimate and embodied vocabulary of care, although the meaning of any particular occurrence is established by its context and by more than etymology. Isaiah 49:15 draws on maternal imagery, and in it remembrance and compassion converge.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)
The strongest imaginable human attachment becomes an analogy for God’s commitment to Zion, and the comparison culminates in divine superiority, since even a mother may forget her child while God holds His people in constant remembrance. Hosea 11 offers an even more remarkable example. The chapter opens with God recalling Israel’s childhood and describing the relationship through parental affection, with God loving Israel, calling His son out of Egypt, teaching Ephraim to walk, and tending him, while Israel repeatedly turned away. The language reaches its emotional climax when God asks how He could surrender Ephraim or abandon Israel, and the prophet answers with two expressions of inward experience, nehpakh alai libbi, the turning of the divine heart within God, and nikhmeru nichumai, the stirring or warming of His compassion.
Then comes the extraordinary declaration of verse 9, “I am God and no mortal” (Hosea 11:9). The placement is the crux of the passage. God’s declaration of otherness follows the emotional imagery and explains it, because the divine difference from human beings is the reason Israel receives mercy where human anger would have brought destruction. The text associates divine transcendence with extraordinary compassion, so that the statement of God’s otherness becomes a statement about the character of His love.
This observation gives the biblical declarations of God’s difference from humanity a function that later discussion often assigned to them in the opposite direction. In Hosea, God’s otherness accounts for the depth of His tenderness. Whether the passage describes an experience within God or employs human language to communicate divine mercy remains a theological question, and the literary relationship is clear in either case, since the prophet places compassion at the center of God’s conduct toward Israel.
Intimacy Moves Within Limits
The physical descriptions of God introduce another dimension of the question. Genesis 3:8 describes Adam and Eve hearing the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden, the book of Exodus speaks repeatedly of God’s hand, arm, face, and eyes, Isaiah 66:1 declares that heaven is God’s throne and earth His footstool, and Ezekiel 1:26-28 recounts a vision of divine glory in which a humanlike figure appears upon a heavenly throne. These descriptions are grouped under the term anthropomorphism, from the Greek words for human and form, and the emotional descriptions are often given the separate name anthropopathisms, although both belong to the broader phenomenon of describing God through human characteristics.
Exodus 33 provides an especially revealing example. Verse 11 states that God spoke to Moses face to face, as one person speaks to another (Exodus 33:11), and verse 20 declares that the sight of God’s face is lethal to a human being (Exodus 33:20). The chapter subsequently describes God placing Moses within a cleft of the rock, covering him with His hand, and allowing him to see His back (Exodus 33:22-23). The physical imagery is vivid, and the narrative also distinguishes between direct communication and unrestricted perception of the divine presence, so that “face to face” describes the intimacy of the conversation and leaves the question of what Moses observed to the same chapter’s careful limits.
These passages raise a historical question about whether the biblical authors understood God to possess some form of heavenly embodiment or employed figurative language to describe divine manifestations. The biblical literature offers more than one answer. Ancient Israelite descriptions of divine presence developed in a world where heavenly kingship, divine councils, and enthroned deities were familiar religious concepts, and Ezekiel’s throne vision employs humanlike imagery while qualifying what the prophet sees with the words appearance and likeness of divine glory. Later philosophical interpretations assumed that bodily descriptions apply to God only figuratively, and the biblical texts frame the matter in their own vocabulary, which differs from the terminology Jewish and Christian theologians subsequently developed. A description of God’s appearance, a claim about God’s essential nature, and a prohibition against representing God in an image are related propositions, and each deserves to be heard in its own register.
Translation Is the First Interpretation
One of the most revealing developments in this history took place before the great medieval systems were written, because ancient translators were already making interpretive decisions about the apparently human characteristics of God. In Genesis 6:6 the Hebrew shows God regretting the creation of humanity and grieving in His heart, and the ancient Greek Septuagint renders the verse with enethymēthē and dienoēthē, verbs associated with consideration and thought. The emotional vocabulary of the Hebrew becomes more cognitive in the Greek, and the translators gave the passage an emphasis more readily compatible with divine deliberation, even as other emotionally charged descriptions in the surrounding verses remain in the Greek text.
The Aramaic Targumim, the translations and interpretive renderings associated with the synagogue reading of the Torah, offer a second example. In Genesis 3:8 the Hebrew describes the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden, and Targum Onkelos mediates the description through the Memra, the Word of the LORD, an expression absent from the Hebrew original. Other Targumic passages speak of God’s Word, Glory, or Presence where the Hebrew describes direct divine activity, and the practice varies from passage to passage, with many anthropomorphic expressions receiving a more literal rendering.
The Targumic Memra and the Christian Logos invite comparison, since Jewish Aramaic translators and early Christian theologians both turned to the language of God’s Word when interpreting divine activity and manifestation. Each concept developed within its own interpretive setting and retains its own history, and the comparison rewards careful investigation because the similarities and the differences are both instructive. These examples show that the interpretation of anthropomorphic language began at the level of translation, long before Maimonides or Aquinas composed systematic accounts of divine attributes, with translators deciding how divine emotion and movement should reach new audiences. Translation had already become an act of theology.
Jewish Interpretation Grows Along Several Paths
Jewish interpretation of anthropomorphic language developed over many centuries and took several forms, beginning in the Second Temple period, when Jewish thinkers inherited the concrete imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures while engaging intellectual traditions that emphasized divine transcendence. The encounter with Greek philosophy was especially consequential and produced a range of Jewish responses. Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first century, represents one influential response, interpreting biblical descriptions of divine activity through an elaborate philosophical and allegorical framework in which God is free of the bodily limits and emotional disturbances of human beings.
Philo’s treatise On the Unchangeableness of God addresses Genesis 6:6 directly. His approach begins from the conviction that the divine nature is free of the changes characteristic of created beings, and he consequently reads the language of divine regret to describe a constant divine purpose that governs a changing creation. Other Second Temple writings preserved vivid descriptions of divine glory, heavenly thrones, angelic intermediaries, and celestial manifestations, and these traditions show that Jewish reflection on God’s transcendence moved comfortably alongside visionary and humanlike imagery.
Rabbinic literature preserved a similarly rich range of expression. The Talmud and Midrash describe God grieving over Israel’s suffering, showing compassion, rejoicing, and responding to human conduct, and these portrayals sit alongside interpretive principles that acknowledge the human character of scriptural expression. One of the most important of these principles is Dibberah Torah kilshon benei adam, “The Torah speaks in human language.” The principle was originally employed in particular discussions of biblical interpretation and later became central to explaining anthropomorphic expressions more broadly, because it recognizes that Scripture communicates through the linguistic conventions available to human beings.
By the medieval period the question had become central to Jewish philosophical theology. Saadia Gaon defended divine incorporeality and interpreted scriptural descriptions of bodily characteristics through figurative and theological explanation, while Judah Halevi approached revelation and religious experience through the distinctive character of Israel’s encounter with God. Maimonides then developed one of the most systematic accounts of divine attributes in Jewish intellectual history. In The Guide for the Perplexed he argues that the attributes revealed to Moses describe God’s actions, so that God is called merciful because He performs actions human beings call merciful, and angry because His judgments resemble what human beings do under the influence of anger. The likeness lies in the action and its effects, and the psychological experience belongs to human beings.
Maimonides’ interpretation follows from his larger understanding of divine simplicity and transcendence. God’s essence lies beyond the categories applicable to created beings, and even positive attributes require careful qualification because ordinary language risks implying multiplicity or limitation within God. His treatment of Exodus 33 is especially illuminating, since Moses’ request to know God is understood through the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and His knowable actions, and the divine attributes communicate what can be discerned of God’s activity within creation. This is a profound philosophical development, and it stands among several voices in a Jewish conversation that includes others.
Jewish mystical traditions, including Kabbalah, continued to employ elaborate symbolic descriptions of divine relationships, attributes, and manifestations. These descriptions were generally intended to communicate divine self-disclosure through symbol, and the tradition understood their images to speak symbolically of God’s manifestation in relationship. Where Maimonides emphasized the inadequacy of positive descriptions of the divine essence, the mystical traditions explored the capacity of symbolic language to communicate dimensions of divine manifestation, and both approaches sought to preserve divine transcendence through strikingly different theological vocabularies.
The Sages Keep the Tears
Alongside the philosophical current, the rabbinic imagination preserved a God who mourns, and the sages portrayed divine grief with a boldness that surprises readers who approach Jewish tradition through Maimonides alone. A passage in tractate Berakhot tells of Rabbi Yose entering one of the ruins of Jerusalem to pray, where he hears a divine voice cooing like a dove and lamenting the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel. The same passage portrays the Holy One roaring like a lion over His ruined house during each watch of the night. The sages portray a sovereign God who grieves over His own judgment and over the children whose sufferings that judgment brought.
A second example arises in tractate Hagigah, where the sages read the prophet’s words in Jeremiah 13:17 that the divine soul weeps in secret for the pride of Israel. The Talmudic discussion takes the verse with full seriousness and locates the divine weeping in a hidden inner chamber of the divine dwelling, which allows the sages to hold the scriptural picture of God’s weeping beside the scriptural picture of joy in His presence. The rabbinic reading preserves the emotional force of the prophet’s image and supplies an architecture of the divine dwelling that gives it room to stand.
The twentieth-century Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel built a systematic theology on this strand of the tradition. In The Prophets he proposed that the key to prophetic religion lies in the divine pathos, the conviction of the prophets that God is moved by human conduct and responds to it with real concern, and he set this biblical portrait against the unmoved mover of Greek philosophy. Heschel understood pathos to be the form divine concern takes in relationship, a care directed toward the world and responsive to what occurs there, and his case draws on prophetic texts, Hosea among them, in which divine feeling is the center of the message. His work shows that the logic of Hosea, with its God whose otherness grounds His tenderness, continued to find expression within Jewish thought alongside the logic of Maimonides.
The rabbinic God who weeps and the modern theology of divine pathos give the Jewish tradition a second current that runs through the same communities and texts as the philosophical current. Maimonides and the sages shared a commitment to God’s transcendence and drew different consequences from it, and the tradition has held both within a single library. The presence of both gives later readers, Jewish and Christian alike, a fuller map of what the Hebrew language about God can mean.
Christian Interpretation Inherits the Question
Christian interpretation began within this already diverse Jewish intellectual world. The earliest followers of Jesus inherited Israel’s Scriptures, Jewish traditions concerning divine Wisdom and Glory, and existing questions about God’s visibility and transcendence. As Christian theology developed, some interpreters introduced a distinctive explanation for biblical theophanies, reading the visible appearances of God in Israel’s Scriptures to be manifestations of the preexistent Logos, subsequently identified with Jesus.
Justin Martyr offers an important example. In his second-century Dialogue with Trypho, Justin argues that the figure who appeared to Abraham near the oaks of Mamre was distinct from God the Father, who remains transcendent and invisible, and he identifies this visible divine agent with the Logos whom Christians identify with Jesus. The distinction allows Justin to preserve the transcendence of the Father while accounting for biblical narratives in which God appears in visible form. His argument also reveals how closely early Christian theology engaged Jewish scriptural interpretation, since Justin draws evidence for his understanding of the Logos from the Hebrew narratives of divine appearance. His reading belongs to the history of Christian interpretation, where the Logos is the visible agent of divine manifestation.
Origen, writing in the third century, developed a different emphasis. Influenced by philosophical approaches to divine transcendence and by the spiritual interpretation of Scripture, he frequently understood anthropomorphic language to invite interpretation beyond its immediate physical imagery. His approach bears important similarities to Philo’s, while his broader theological commitments were distinctively Christian.
Augustine articulated a particularly influential account of divine emotion and immutability. In The City of God he addresses the language of divine regret surrounding the Flood, explaining that divine anger names God’s judgment against wrongdoing and carries none of the psychological disturbance that accompanies human anger. Divine reconsideration, in his reading, describes God’s unchanging governance of a changing creation, and Scripture employs these expressions because human language enables divine realities to become intelligible to people whose understanding is formed through ordinary experience. Scripture accommodates its audience, and the accommodation allows each description to carry its meaning at the level the reader needs.
Thomas Aquinas developed this approach further within medieval Christian scholasticism. Like Maimonides, he affirmed divine simplicity, incorporeality, and immutability, and in the Summa Theologiae he placed greater emphasis on analogical language, arguing that certain attributes can be meaningfully affirmed of God while differing in mode from their human counterparts. To call God good or wise communicates genuine truth about God, even though divine goodness and wisdom differ in manner from the human qualities that share their names. This approach raises a pointed question for descriptions of divine emotion, since a language that communicates truth about God through analogy can disclose more in the descriptions of divine compassion than the external effects of divine action alone. Classical Christian theologians answered that question in different ways, and the conversation continues.
Modern Christian theology has produced additional approaches, including open theism and process theology, whose proponents argue in different ways that the biblical portrayal of divine responsiveness deserves serious attention in describing God’s relationship with creation. Defenders of classical theism respond that genuine divine love and responsiveness are compatible with an unchanging divine essence. The disagreement illustrates the enduring significance of the ancient biblical language, since the same descriptions that engaged Philo, Augustine, and Maimonides continue to generate theological debate.
Both Traditions Hold Two Currents
The most striking convergence in this history joins Augustine and Maimonides, who wrote in different centuries, in different languages, and within different communities of faith, and who reached remarkably similar solutions. Both distinguish divine action from the human psychological states associated with similar actions, so that God’s judgment resembles anger in its effects while the disturbance of anger belongs to creatures. Both hold that Scripture communicates through language suited to human understanding, and both affirm that this accommodation serves the reader and honors the Author. Their systems differ considerably, with Maimonides grounding the argument in divine simplicity and the limits of positive attribution, and Augustine grounding it in God’s unchanging governance of time, yet the shared conclusion shows that Jewish and Christian philosophical interpretation often arrived at kindred answers to the same ancient question.
A second convergence appears on the other side of the ledger. The sages who heard God roaring over the Temple, the prophets who spoke of the divine heart turning within God, and Heschel with his theology of pathos all hold the logic of Hosea, in which divine otherness explains divine tenderness. The Jewish and Christian traditions therefore each contain two currents, one that draws from transcendence a reason to interpret emotional language in abstract terms and one that draws from transcendence the ground of an unusually deep compassion. The two currents run through shared texts and often through the same communities, and each tradition holds both within one library.
The biblical texts supply their own qualifications, and these qualifications deepen the human language they accompany. Hosea’s declaration of God’s divinity, Samuel’s declaration that God holds His judgment where a human being would change his mind, and Exodus’s distinction between speaking face to face and seeing God’s face all show that the Hebrew Bible recognizes the limits of comparison between God and humanity. The biblical writers continue to portray God remembering, grieving, loving, and responding to His creation. If anthropomorphic language were an unfortunate consequence of inadequate vocabulary, the authors would have minimized it, and some of the most profound passages in Scripture depend on it. The prophets communicate divine compassion through parental affection, divine grief through the language of the heart, and covenantal faithfulness through remembrance, and these expressions carry the theological and literary force of their messages.
Human Language Carries the Divine Reality
Within the Hebrew text Hosea 11 shows the pattern that gives the whole history its shape. God describes His compassion for Israel in some of the most intimate language in Scripture and then declares that He is God and no mortal, and the declaration of otherness supplies the reason the compassion holds. Jewish and Christian interpreters developed several ways of receiving this pattern, sometimes preserving the emotional and physical imagery, sometimes interpreting it allegorically, and sometimes explaining it through elaborate accounts of divine nature and action, and the Hebrew text is their common starting point.
In the Hebrew Bible divine otherness is the source of divine nearness. God’s transcendence explains why His mercy exceeds what human beings would show, and His mercy discloses what His transcendence means. The most faithful reading holds the two together as Hosea does, allowing the philosophical traditions to guard the Creator’s distinction from creation and allowing the prophetic language to carry the full force of His love. The language is human, the reality it describes is divine, and the Hebrew Bible makes the first the chosen vessel of the second.
Sources
Primary Texts
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae.
- Augustine, The City of God. CCEL.
- Berakhot (Babylonian Talmud). Sefaria.
- Hagigah (Babylonian Talmud). Sefaria.
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho. CCEL.
- Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed.
- Philo of Alexandria, On the Unchangeableness of God.
- Targum Onkelos, Genesis 3:8. Sefaria.
Secondary Literature
- Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
