God’s Nose in LXX-Pentateuch: An Anthropomorphism Avoided or Metaphor Installed?

Over the last decade, attention to bodies and their various roles/significances gained interest within Biblical Studies. As a particular aspect of this “Körpergeschichte” (Wagner 2014), the issue of divine embodiment is addressed. It is shown that God, in the Bible, has a body and that His body is often described with humanlike terms. One humanlike part of God’s biblical body is God’s nose. On the verge between anthropomorphism and anthropopathy, God’s nose (אף) refers in the Hebrew Bible both to God’s physical olfactory/respiratory organ and, metaphorically, His anger. Studies in cognitive linguistics show how the mention of a “burning nose” (חרה + אף) figures as Hebrew expression for anger, as part of the conceptual metaphor “ANGER IS THE HEAT OF FLUID IN A CONTAINER” (Kruger 2000, Kotzé 2004). The divine nose figures then as a nozzle (‘tuyères’) through which the heat (or fire) of anger is blown (Amzallag 2017). Accordingly, God’s physical nose serves at the same time as an “anatomical idiom” for divine anger (Thomas 2008). Consequently, the LXX-translators had to deal with an intricate conceptual metaphor, when rendering God’s nose. A striking phenomenon occurs: in LXX-Pentateuch, both God’s physical nose as well as His metonymic nose are rendered by a form of ὀργή or θυμός (anger). This over-consistency was seen as an anti-anthropomorphism, avoiding the ascription of a humanlike nose to God (Fritsch 1943). Moreover, also the ‘burning’ of the metonymic nose in expressions of anger, is rendered by a form of ὀργίζω or θυμόω (to be angry), thereby largely eliminating the element of heat. Did LXX use this translation out of avoidance for God’s human form, or did the translator simply render a ‘dead metaphor’ into a more idiomatic figure in the target language? This Greek translation challenges at the same time the generally accepted theories for metaphor-translation in LXX (as here also non-metaphors are translated by their idiomatic sense) and the presumed anti-anthropomorphism of the translator (as here the anthropopathic emotion of anger is underlined). My paper entails three goals: 1) to set out the difference between LXX’s and MT’s presentation of God’s nose in the Pentateuch, including its repercussions on God’s identity 2) to evaluate if a possible anti-anthropomorphism avoiding God’s nose underlies LXX’s translation and 3) to show how the LXX-translation of this idiom gives clues to interpreting corporeal metaphors and their evolution from ‘live, moribund to dead metaphores’ (Alm-Arvius 2006).