What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 2: Characteristics and Hierarchy
July 2025 | Vol. 13.7
By Michael B. Hundley
This article is the third in a 4-part series of articles on the nature of God in the Near East and Hebrew Bible. Check out the first and second articles if you missed them!
In my previous article, I outlined the multiple biblical characters who might be classified as gods. Here, we turn to the characteristics that make them so and the relationship between them. Minimally, the gods are perceived as nonhumans who possess power, and most possessed humanlike agency. According to Genesis 3:22, gods also possess immortality and the ability to make moral choices.
Then YHWH Elohim said, “See, the humans have become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now they might reach out their hands and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever.”
The Bible presents YHWH as the quintessential deity who has control over the cosmos, while the sons of God, angels, cherubim, seraphim, the Destroyer, the Adversary, Lady Wisdom, monsters, and disease likewise have the power to affect humanity for good or ill. Although the Bible minimizes their effectiveness, Israelites believed that foreign gods possessed power too. Why else would they be tempted to worship them?
Although the Bible attempts to elevate YHWH above humanity, it cannot help but describe him in human terms. While it may shroud him in fire and cloud on Mt Sinai and in the sanctuary and distance him from humanity, descriptions of deity are consistently anthropomorphic. For example, YHWH walks in the garden (Gen 3:8) and speaks face-to-face to Moses (Exod 33:11). When present, descriptions of divine form are also anthropomorphic, though in an elevated way (e.g., Gen 18; Isa 6; 66:1; Jer 1; Ezek 1; Amos 9; Dan 7).
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen.
Rather than YHWH being humanlike, the text presents humans as being made in the image of YHWH (Gen 1:27; see similarly the Mesopotamian Enuma elish and Atrahasis as well as the Egyptian Merikare), thereby privileging humanity instead of diminishing the gods.
Angels too take humanlike form (e.g., Gen 19; Jdg 13) and the sons of God presumably do since they are compatible to mate with human women (Gen 6). Other divine forms are not described, while cherubim and seraphim appear to deviate from the human model as do monsters and natural elements. It seems then, the more central and major the gods, the more likely they are to be anthropomorphic.
Portable icon depicting the Archangel Michael, carrying a scepter and a sphere. From the chapel of the Chora Monastery in Constantinople (1315-1320). Image source: Byzantine Museum, Athens.
Some of the human descriptors may be metaphorical and, given the limits of using human language to describe a non-human god, unavoidable. Anthropomorphization also may be a matter of what cognitive scientists of religion call theological incorrectness. Official theology is often complex and clashes with intuitive expectations. Even if theologically incorrect, the mind gravitates to ideas that are easier to comprehend. Even if theologically inaccurate, a humanlike god is more understandable and approachable than a nonhuman one. Theological incorrectness also may extend to gendering YHWH as male because of simplicity and patriarchal assumptions, even though the text presents males and females equally as in YHWH’s image (Gen 1:27; see also Num 23:19).
Perhaps more importantly, the Bible imagines YHWH with a humanlike inner world. Although elevated, YHWH seems to have a humanlike mind, desires, and emotions. For the most part, YHWH reasons and acts like humans, makes humanlike moral choices, wants devotion, gifts, respect, obedience, and connection, and expresses love, hate, anger, regret, and compassion. Once again, rather than being humanlike traits, the Bible seems to present humanity as designed to be like God (e.g., Gen 1:26-27). In fact, the human ability to make moral choices is not innate, but a product of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and becoming godlike (Gen 3).
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
The Bible gives us minimal access to the interior world of other potential gods, though angels, the seraphim, the Adversary, and Lady Wisdom seem to possess humanlike minds and agency, speaking, reasoning, and acting in humanlike ways. Cherubim, the Destroyer, and monsters seem more distantly anthropopathic (having humanlike feelings). In the biblical system, YHWH alone may legitimately receive offerings, but Israelites nonetheless presented offerings to foreign gods and believed they were able to respond to human entreaty, making them anthropopathic as well. Once again, it seems the more central and major the gods, the more likely they are to have humanlike agency.
As in the wider Ancient Near East, people viewed biblical gods through the human lens, according to how they affected humanity and the dominant human model. People tend to project humanlike minds onto the things that matter to them in their environments—whether more (e.g., gods) or less sophisticated than us (e.g., animals and objects)— a phenomenon cognitive scientists call the Theory of Mind. Humanizing gods is both natural and practical. Since we are the dominant species and the only ones we understand, the human model is largely unavoidable. Since it corresponds to the way the brain is predisposed to think, it is also more comprehensible and memorable. Representing deities as “like us,” intentional agents with humanlike minds means that we automatically possess a wealth of knowledge about them, which guides our expectations and interactions with them. Having humanlike beings in charge of the cosmos empowers us to comprehend and more importantly influence the world around us by serving them.
Hierarchy
As in the wider ANE, biblical gods may be divided into central and peripheral deities, with the central gods further subdivided into three tiers using modern language to approximate the ancient hierarchy: high god as one-stop-shop god, major gods as specialists, and minor gods as servants. YHWH is the high god who stands alone on the top line as the one-stop-shop god. While there are hints that for some he, like Ugaritic El, partnered with Asherah (especially from the site of Kuntillet Ajrud), the Bible presents YHWH as officially single and singular.
Drawing of an image painted on a jar found at Kuntillet ‘Arjud in the Sinai Peninsula, depicting human figures and animals, dated to the 8th century BCE. “Yahweh and his Asherah” is written across the top of the two central human figures. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
In pursuit of monolatry, the Bible depopulated and depersonalized the major god category commonly made up of specialists, leaving a purposely nebulous group. By analogy with the wider Ancient Near East, the most likely candidates are the divine council and the sons of God who seem to be members of it in Job 1-2; the Adversary too insofar as he joins the sons of God and plays a major role in the Joban narrative; perhaps the Destroyer because his power mirrors that of other major gods. If understood literally, Lady Wisdom too would be a major god, though one that appears nowhere else in the Bible beyond Proverbs 1-9. The minor god category remains comparatively full with angels as the dominant figures alongside the guardian cherubim and seraphim and perhaps the Destroyer. On the periphery, the foreign gods (Gen 35:2, 4; Deut 31:16; Josh 24:20, 23; Jdg 10:16; 1 Sam 7:3; Jer 5:19; 2 Chr 33:15) or other god category (Exod 20:3; 23:13; Deut 5:7; 6:14; etc.) dominated. Since so many other gods are off-limits, this is the catch-all category, likely including the gods of other peoples, Baal, goddesses, divinized natural elements, as well as the demonized Azazel, seirim, and šedim.
In the biblical world and in the eyes of Israelites, however, YHWH may not have always occupied such a lofty perch. He likely began as a family god (Exod 3-4) and became primarily the national and patron god of a largely insignificant people (e.g., Exod 3:18; 5:1; 7:16; 9:13; 10:3; 24:10). While he sought exclusivity from his people, he initially laid no claim to the other nations who were allotted their own gods (Jdg 11:24; Mic 4:5; see also Deut 4:19; 32:8-9; Psa 82) and free to choose whom to follow (Josh 24:14-15).
So now YHWH, the God of Israel, has conquered the Amorites for the benefit of his people Israel. Do you intend to take their place? Should you not possess what your god Chemosh gives you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that YHWH our God has conquered for our benefit?
For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of YHWH our God forever and ever.
There is even some indication that he originally may not have been the high god of the Israelite pantheon. Drawing from Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and Psalm 82, some scholars suggest that El and El-Elyon were originally the names of the regional high god, the same high god at Ugarit. In the Greek and Dead Sea Scrolls versions of Deuteronomy 32:8-9, Elyon as high god apportions the nations according to the sons of god, with YHWH as one of the sons of God given Israel.
So far in this series, I have explored the definition and nature of “God” in the Ancient Near East, the question of who counts as a “God” in the Hebrew Bible, and the characteristics of the biblical pantheon. In the fourth and final article in this series, I will consider the question of how the biblical pantheon developed and transformed from monolatry (exclusive worship) to monotheism (the acknowledgment of only one god).
Michael B. Hundley is Assistant Professor of Teaching in Religious Studies at the University of Memphis. He has published multiple books on the intersection of human and divine in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near East.
Read the first two articles in this series: What is a God in the Ancient Near East? and What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part I: The Divine Cast of Characters
Further Reading:
Michael Hundley, Yahweh among the Gods: The Divine in Genesis, Exodus, and the Ancient Near East (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Michael Hundley, Ancient Gods and Monsters: The Bible, the Ancient Near East and Beyond (forthcoming).
Brett Maiden, Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Jason Slone, Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (New York: Knopf, 2021).
How to cite this article:
Hundley, M. 2025. “What is a God in the Hebrew Bible? Part 2: Characteristics and Hierarchy” The Ancient Near East Today 13.7. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/god-hebrew-bible-part2/.
Want to learn more?
Moses’ Other Names: A Clue to the Biblical Exodus During Egypt’s Civil War?
From Monolatry to Monotheism: The Changing Face of the Biblical Pantheon
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