Is God a Body? Isaiah, Divine Dissimilitude, and Scriptural Signification

Abstract

Abstract In light of recent biblical scholarship claiming that the God of the Hebrew Bible has a body, this article investigates how Aquinas reads Isaiah’s description of God in embodied, anthropomorphic terms in 6, 1 (I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up, etc.) in tandem with the prophet’s denial that God is like any creature in 40, 18 (To whom have you likened God? Or what image will you make for Him?). We seek to show that, according to Aquinas, Is. 6, 1 teaches not that God has or is a body, but rather that He is not.