2.2. Direct anthropomorphism in the shape and description of God in Tanakh
2.2.1 Corporeality of God
According to Tanakh, does God have a body? One of the strongest laws in Tanakh is that you cannot create representational images of God. Deuteronomy 4:16 goes into fine detail: “Do not do evil and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman, the form of any beast on earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth. And when you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them.” So, in that sense, this kind of anthropomorphism is illegal in Jewish law.
And yet it isn’t that simple: there are many instances of the use of anthropomorphism in Tanakh. The most difficult to explain is Gen.1:26-28 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness […] (27) And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
In general, these anthropomorphic references can be explained using the argument of Rabbi Ishmael in Midrashim Sifrei Numbers 112 : “The Torah speaks in the language of men.” What Rabbi Ishmael meant by this was that the Torah was written in a way that everyone could understand, even uneducated peasants. Another way to understand Rabbi Ishmael is that the vocabulary available to the Tanakh is concrete, and more limited than ours today, especially for philosophical ideas – so it has limited ability to describe divine concepts, for which man has no experience, and therefore no words.
However, there are some rare anthropomorphic instances that cannot be explained using only that argument, such as this verse of Genesis. In this case, Maimonides writes that “Genesis 1:26 does say that man was made in the image of God. If taken literally, this passage would mean that God has two arms, two legs, a face, and hair.” He continues by saying that one could say that “He is the image of his father,” meaning that two people look alike. But sometimes the degree of resemblance is much looser. If we say, “He was the very image of valor,” no one would argue that valor has arms and legs.”
Born left-handed 