Based upon a rigorous monotheism, Jewish thought usually attributed to the One God a wide
plurality of faces, forms, and names – a trait which resembles mythical types of religious
literature. This essay intends to revisit this essential paradox, in the light of recent research,
focusing particularly on rabbinic texts. It attempts to clarify to what extent and in which ways the
linguistic representations of a God with anthropomorphic an anthropopathic features were
allowed and legitimated by the Jewish sages. It seems that they were indeed well aware of the
implications connected to the Scriptural, as well as their own employment of those verbal icons.
They therefore employed various strategies of discourse (some of them micro-linguistic, some
others macro-linguistic), in order to keep the vivid experience and imagery of divine forms and
feelings within the framework of a monotheism which had finally to reject any instance of idolatry
(that is, plurality, transparency, stark hypostatization of the images…). Those strategies of
discourse were then elaborated or rejected in later stages of the Jewish tradition, especially within
the debates on divine attributes and emanations, in which tok part both philosophers and mystics
of medieval Judaism.
