So it’s not a YouTube video. It’s not some amateurs. It’s three biblical scholars who all have phds and two of them were professors of theology. It’s an hour long podcast discussing several views, not just their own, but several different views that Jewish sects have all held about god written about in writings like Talmuds and midrashs and part of that discussion is about two books one by a fourth biblical scholar. In those views you hear of some believing God had no body, some believing he had a body make of fiery light, some that he had a body very much like our own. Some believed the body was more manly, some believed it was more feminine, some believed his body had genitalia of both the male and female sex and some believe his body was genderless. In the books, which I’ve also read, along with about a dozen other books on god, there are even more views that was held by ancient Jewish people about god such as god having no body, but could possess plants, people and even rocks and animate them. Some believed that Yahweh was a mountain god and El was a storm deity worshipped by Canaanites and that Jews arose as a sect within Canaanites and overtime the story of Yahweh and the story of El were merged together. Some believed god knew everything and done did not. Some were monotheists, some were polytheists but most were actually a third type called monistic. One sect of Jews even believed El was a giant bird like god and we see some of that in texts such as the spirit hovering above the waters and so on.
So I perfectly understand the context of the snippet you read. I did not misunderstand any of it. You highlighted a snippet and tried to weaponize it as some sort of “aha” but it just was not.
Which goes back to why I came here. I came here looking for a wide diverse group of Christians. Stoic Christians, messianic Christians, anti Pauline Christians, Christian mystics, and so on.
I love the Bible. I’ve been studying the Bible for close to 20 years with several years in college going pretty in-depth into it. I’ve read literally hundreds of academic books on it and have listened to thousands of hours of scholarly discussions on it. I was hoping to further expand that in a forum like this.
I don’t expect to change your mind. It takes years of hard work and intense studying to move deeper into the Bible than plain text reading and to escape self imposed echo chambers. I don’t expect 99.99% of yall of doing that. That’s ok. I’m not here to change minds. I’m here to share things I find cool with those who are already in the process of deconstruction and reconstruction. I’m here to leave comments and posts that people like me hears from now, even after I’m not here possibly, comes across and use word searches to track specific discussions. I do it all the time. I sometimes read forums that are almost 20 years old at times and benefit from it greatly.