# Why doesn't the Judeo-Christian God have a wife? Where's Mrs. God?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [May 13, 2004, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942 "2004-05-13T12:54:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 12:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/1 "2004-05-13T12:54:58Z")
How can God be an overwhelmingly male persona without true balance? You can make all sorts of sophisticated arguments about the “all encompassing holistic duality of God’s sexuality”, but in the end it’s all after the fact deconstructionist handwaving. Historically, the Judeo-Christan God is a unquestionably a **man-God** , and definitely has a big, swinging God penis.
Seems disjoint somehow. What happened to Mrs. God? Why did she get left behind? Did it happen in the early Judiac interpretation of God’s nature to differentiate their beliefs from those of polytheistic oppressors?
Who cut Mom God out of the picture?
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/2 "2004-05-13T12:58:38Z")
She stays barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, when she’s not in the bedroom.
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### Author:  [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/3 "2004-05-13T13:00:06Z")
> [@astro](#):
>
> How can God be an overwhelmingly male persona without true balance? You can make all sorts of sophisticated arguments about the “all encompassing holistic duality of God’s sexuality”, but in the end it’s all after the fact deconstructionist handwaving. Historically, the Judeo-Christan God is a unquestionably a **man-God** , and definitely has a big, swinging God penis.
Well, not so. Historically, at least post-Jesus, there’s unquestionably a long tradition of using male imagery to describe God, and Christians (by which I mean _all_ Christians, not just the evangelical sort) believe that God became incarnate in a man’s body, but there’s also a tradition of using female imagery to describe God (Julian of Norwich comes to mind), and Christians (or at least Catholics) believe that (aside from the Incarnation) God is beyond gender, since he/she/it encompasses all.
The fact that we often (too often) think of God as exclusively male says more about the paucity of our language and our imagination than it says about God.
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### Author:  [@norinew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/norinew)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/4 "2004-05-13T13:02:19Z")
Well, you might dismiss it as “Hand-waving”, but to my spiritual perception, there is no “Mom-God” because God, just as He is, is all things. Even referring to Him in the masculine is just a way to get a convenient handle on things. God, to my way of understanding, does not live within the constraints of gender, time, place, etc. I refer to God as “Him”, because to say “It” seems disrespectful to me. YMMV.
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### Author:  [@El\_Zagna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Zagna)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/5 "2004-05-13T13:22:51Z")
Well, if God is “all things”, doesn’t that make the claim that God created man in his own image meaningless? That means I am everything, and I know I’m not.
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### Author:  [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/6 "2004-05-13T14:24:01Z")
> [@bnorton](#):
>
> Well, if God is “all things”, doesn’t that make the claim that God created man in his own image meaningless? That means I am everything, and I know I’m not.
Not at all. It’s over-simplifying things to an extreme degree to think that to believe that God created man in his own image means that man _looks_ like God. The phrase refers to God’s intent to create a being with free will and an intellect and a soul and so on. And it doesn’t imply at all that God created man to be the _equal_ of God, or to be “everything.”
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### Author:  [@El\_Zagna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Zagna)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/7 "2004-05-13T14:41:49Z")
> [@LMM](#):
>
> It’s over-simplifying things to an extreme degree to think that to believe that God created man in his own image means that man _looks_ like God. The phrase refers to God’s intent to create a being with free will and an intellect and a soul and so on. And it doesn’t imply at all that God created man to be the _equal_ of God, or to be “everything.”
Well, here’s the quote from Genesis 1 (King James Version):
> [@](#):
>
> 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
> 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Where does it say anything about free will, intellect or soul? It doesn’t. Now, you can spin it to mean whatever you’d like, and I’m fine with that, but the OP is obviously dealing with a more literalist approach.
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### Author:  [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/8 "2004-05-13T14:46:33Z")
Judaism believes G-d to be a non-physical being, with neither distinctly male nor distinctly female traits. All traits that can be found in either human sex have some expression in G-d.
The male pronoun is generally used for G-d, because there is no neuter pronoun (“it”) in the Hebrew language. Even inanimate objects are assigned a gender. But this is merely a grammatical issue, not an issue of G-d’s nature.
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### Author:  [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/9 "2004-05-13T14:52:07Z")
bnorton:
> [@](#):
>
> Where does it say anything about free will, intellect or soul? It doesn’t
It follows naturally from the belief that G-d is a non-physical being. If one believes that, then it must mean that “in G-d’s form” refers to spiritual rather than physical attributes.
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### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/10 "2004-05-13T15:24:53Z")
> [@cmkeller](#):
>
> bnorton:
>
> It follows naturally from the belief that G-d is a non-physical being. If one believes that, then it must mean that “in G-d’s form” refers to spiritual rather than physical attributes.
Conceptually this plays well, but if this truly reflects the soul of the Jewish consideration of G-d, why does Orthodox Judiasm manfiest itself in real world terms as a highly patriarchal culture with quite strict male-female role separation. One would think Orthodox Jewish women would have been able to carve out a better deal if G-d was a truly “non-physical being, with neither distinctly male nor distinctly female traits”.
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### Author:  [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/11 "2004-05-13T15:51:22Z")
I’m sure lots of Orthodox Jewish women don’t think they’re getting a bad deal at all _S_ (And yeah, I bet many do.)
Judaism has several Feminine Aspects of the Divine- the Shekinah, the Queen Shabbat, Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, one of the meanings of El Shaddai is G-d Full-Breasted. And in Christianity, there is the Holy Spirit. Primarily tho in Judaic & Christian Scripture- who is Mrs God? We are! Israel is the Wife of HaShem, the Church is the Bride of Christ. Which is one reason why Goddess-worship was forbidden- it’s essentially Nature/Self-worship.
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### Author:  [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/12 "2004-05-13T15:54:33Z")
> [@bnorton](#):
>
> Well, here’s the quote from Genesis 1 (King James Version):
> Where does it say anything about free will, intellect or soul? It doesn’t. Now, you can spin it to mean whatever you’d like, and I’m fine with that, but the OP is obviously dealing with a more literalist approach.
Putting aside for the moment any questions (and there are many) about the quality of the translation in the King James Bible, where in that quote does it say anything about man _looking_ like God?
Even (especially then, since there was no concept of the Incarnation) in pre-Christian times, God was not thought to be a physical being. So man being created in God’s image must mean something else. It follows, then, that the image of God present in man must be non-physical attributes. And they can only be things in the spiritual (soul, whatever word you want to use) nature of man.
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### Author:  [@Paul\_in\_Qatar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_in_Qatar)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/13 "2004-05-13T15:56:40Z")
Islam teachers that God has no partners, wives, or children. He is after all The First Cause, there can be no other before Him.
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### Author:  [@Aldebaran](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aldebaran)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/14 "2004-05-13T16:29:46Z")
Islam also doesn’t teach that God is supposed to have a gender 🙂
Salaam. A
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/15 "2004-05-13T16:47:59Z")
In this thread – [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=254630](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=254630) – there is some discussion of theories that, in the beliefs of the very early Hebrews, Yahweh/El Shaddai had a wife or consort goddess, perhaps even several.
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### Author:  [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/16 "2004-05-13T17:06:02Z")
astro:
> [@](#):
>
> Conceptually this plays well, but if this truly reflects the soul of the Jewish consideration of G-d, why does Orthodox Judiasm manfiest itself in real world terms as a highly patriarchal culture with quite strict male-female role separation.
Because we believe that everything physical is a reflection of underlying spiritual realities. As such, there are not only innate physical differences between men and women, but innate spiritual ones as well, each perfectly suited to his or her own task in the perfection of the world.
> [@](#):
>
> One would think Orthodox Jewish women would have been able to carve out a better deal if G-d was a truly “non-physical being, with neither distinctly male nor distinctly female traits”.
On the contrary - it is due to the fact that they see G-d in such terms that makes them see their roles as not inferior, but equal - they just represent different aspects of the G-dliness inherent in humanity, not “lesser” or “fewer” of them.
Separate-but-equal may not be valid in the eyes of American law, but it is true in Jewish doctrine.
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### Author:  [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/17 "2004-05-13T17:19:20Z")
> [@astro](#):
>
> One would think Orthodox Jewish women would have been able to carve out a better deal if G-d was a truly “non-physical being, with neither distinctly male nor distinctly female traits”.
Women get a good deal in Judaism. Women get an especially good deal in Judaism if you compare it with other religions that started at the same time as Judaism. Even in the times of the bible, there are women prophets, and even women judges and generals. Women, both single and married, had the right to own property and enter into contracts. Women can’t be forced to marry against their will, the woman has the right to demand sex from her husband and not the other way around, men aren’t allowed to beat their wives. Judaism says that women are naturally more intuitive and intelligent than men, and that they’re naturally holier.
So, I don’t agree with you that Jewish women got a “bad deal”. They’re not seen as identical to men, but they are seen as complementary. Both men and women have special traits and strengths that the other sex doesn’t, and Judaism teaches that both men and women need each other. But they’re both equal before God.
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### Author:  [@El\_Zagna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Zagna)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2004, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/18 "2004-05-13T17:32:06Z")
> [@LMM](#):
>
> Putting aside for the moment any questions (and there are many) about the quality of the translation in the King James Bible, where in that quote does it say anything about man _looking_ like God?
Uhmmm, well, that’s what image _means_, y’know. From Merriam-Webster on-line:
> [@](#):
>
> Main Entry: 1im·age
> Pronunciation: 'i-mij
> Function: noun
> Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, short for imagene, from Latin imagin-, imago; perhaps akin to Latin imitari to imitate
> 1 : a reproduction or imitation of the form of a person or thing; especially : an imitation in solid form : STATUE
> 2 a : the optical counterpart of an object produced by an optical device (as a lens or mirror) or an electronic device b : a likeness of an object produced on a photographic material
> 3 a : \*\*exact likeness : SEMBLANCE \ \*\* b : a person strikingly like another person \
Notice the example they use.
> [@](#):
>
> Even (especially then, since there was no concept of the Incarnation) in pre-Christian times, God was not thought to be a physical being.
I’m quite skeptical of that claim. I’m afraid I’ll need a cite from you.
Also, if you don’t like King James, pick another translation. All of the over at [BibleGateway.com](http://BibleGateway.com) look pretty similar to me, at least as far as this passage goes.
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### Author:  [@Atticus\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atticus_Finch)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2004, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/19 "2004-05-14T01:40:23Z")
> [@astro](#):
>
> big, swinging God penis.
Band name…
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### Author:  [@Blalron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blalron)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2004, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-doesnt-the-judeo-christian-god-have-a-wife-wheres-mrs-god/244942/20 "2004-05-14T01:57:58Z")
> [@bnorton](#):
>
> Uhmmm, well, that’s what image _means_, y’know. From Merriam-Webster on-line:
>
> Notice the example they use.
> I’m quite skeptical of that claim. I’m afraid I’ll need a cite from you.
>
> Also, if you don’t like King James, pick another translation. All of the over at [BibleGateway.com](http://BibleGateway.com) look pretty similar to me, at least as far as this passage goes.
Anyone here know Hebrew?