Critique of Anthropomorphism

Long before the philosophers, Homer and Hesiod gave the gods human faces, human quarrels, and human crimes — theft, adultery, deceit. Xenophanes of Colophon turned this on its head: if horses and oxen could draw, he scoffed, they would sketch their gods as horses and oxen, for every people simply projects its own form onto heaven. From this came the demand for a truer divine — one, unchanging, and morally perfect. Plato carried the argument into the ideal city, censoring the poets' slanders against the gods, and centuries later Cicero rehearsed the whole debate in Latin.

A note on Numbers 23:19: because it says God is "not a man" and not "a son of man," it is sometimes read as Scripture's own version of the philosophical objection to picturing God in human terms — a verse against anthropomorphism as such. But that is not quite what Balaam is saying. In context, this is an oracle of blessing: Balaam is explaining to Balak why he cannot curse what God has chosen to bless. The full line runs, "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind. Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?" The point is moral and covenantal: unlike humans, who lie and waver and go back on their word, God keeps His promises. It is a statement about God's reliability, drawn by contrast with human fickleness — not a ban on speaking of God in human imagery.

Xenophanes is doing something quite different. Surveying the gods of Homer and Hesiod — gods who steal, deceive, commit adultery, and quarrel — he argues that the poets have simply projected human (and even animal) shape and human vice onto the divine. "Mortals suppose that the gods are born, wear clothes, and have voices and bodies like their own," he observes, adding that if oxen and horses could draw, they would draw gods shaped like oxen and horses. His conclusion is a deliberate philosophical program: the true divine is altogether unlike mortals in form, in passions, and in motion, and any depiction that makes the gods resemble us is mistaken at the root.

The difference is real. Balaam contrasts God with human untrustworthiness in order to affirm a promise; indeed, within the very same oracle he is perfectly comfortable speaking of "the shout of a king" in Israel's midst (Numbers 23:21) and likening God's strength to that of a wild ox (Numbers 23:22). Xenophanes, by contrast, is rejecting the very practice of describing the divine in human form. One is a claim about God's faithfulness; the other is a theory about the nature of religious language and the error of anthropomorphism itself.

So the earlier idea is genuinely distinct. The systematic critique of anthropomorphism — the insistence that any human likeness ascribed to the divine is a category mistake — is a Greek philosophical development, and it entered Jewish thought later, in the Hellenistic period and above all through the medieval falasifa, who built it into a full doctrine of divine incorporeality (most famously in Maimonides). That is why Numbers 23:19, for all that it sets God apart from fickle mortals, is kept separate from this concept: it affirms that God does not lie or change, not that God must never be pictured in human terms.