Who Is “God” in the Torah?

It’s pretty much impossible to overstate how much the word “God” has nothing to do with the supreme being who is the main character of the Hebrew Bible.

The Divine is called many names in Tanakh, one of them unpronounceable, and none of them mean “God.” They’re all almost different characters. The “God” of Israel is a composite. What it’s NOT is a philosophical ideal.

I maintain that the best way to understand “God” in the Hebrew Bible is as the main character of the story, with all the action and change we attribute to literary protagonists happening to “Him.” But really, within the story, “God” is best understood as an experience.

This “main character” is, as I said, multiple characters, and we can get into why, but it’s most fair to the religious experience of the text to relate to it as coherent. So the character’s personality is turbulent and racked with change. It’s a wild ride.

Of course, God-as-experience happens through encounter — i.e. with people, the people we think of as the characters in the Bible — and so the only access to understanding of God’s nature is in the form of their experience of it. All the turbulence and wildness of it.