“Your right hand, O Lord,
is glorious in power;
your right hand, O Lord,
shatters the enemy.” Exodus 15:6
Exodus 15.6 is a part of Parasha Beshalach. Part of this Parasha is a poem, named the Song of the Sea. This poem is one of the oldest parts of Tanakh, becauses it uses no definite article. The definite article in Hebrew came into use in the 10th century, so the poem must be older.
When I discovered the Song of the Sea, one verse stood out to me: “Y’mincha Adonai ned’arie bako’ach, Y’mincha, Adonai, tierarzt oyaive” : “ Your right hand, O Lord, glorious with power. Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.” At first, it struck my interest because I am left-handed. I was curious to find out why it was the right hand of the Lord that smashed the enemy.
Quickly, other questions, connected, raised themselves 🙂 Why would Tanakh talk about the right hand of God when one of the ten commandments, in Exodus 20.4, and again in Deuteronomy 5:7, is: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am an impassioned God.” This is all the stranger because the commandment against sculptured images is repeated so often and so strongly in Tanakh.
In fact, even this very commandment shocked me: at the same time as it tells me that God is without a human shape, it seems to imply that God has human emotions: “For I, The Lord your God, am an impassioned God.”
When I started digging, I figured out that, if I wanted to get the answers I was looking for, I first needed to understand anthropomorphism in Tanakh, then the meaning of right and left in classical Hebrew, before looking into the right hand of God.
Born left-handed 