Does the Bible have the Literary Theme of the Double and does it Debate if God has Multiple Personality?

As noted in previous posts: Jesus treats a case of multiple personality in Mark 5:1-20. And William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, from a psychological perspective, concludes that our experience of the presence of God may really be our perception of an alternate personality. Of course, not everyone would agree with my interpretation of Mark 5:1-20. And William James continued to believe in God, personally.

The present post is about our image of God, since we are made in God’s image, and therefore our image of God may tell us something about our own psychology. The following quotations are from Benjamin D. Sommer’s award-winning book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (1):

“The bulk of this book is devoted to…demonstrating that in parts of the Hebrew Bible the one God has more than one body (and also, we shall see, more than one personality)…” (1, p. 1).

“God’s body and self have a mysterious fluidity and multiplicity” (1, p. 10).

“Some biblical authors, embracing a theological intuition common throughout the ancient Near East, maintained that…God’s body and self are completely unbounded. For these thinkers, who include the J and E authors of the Pentateuch, God has many bodies, and God’s person finds expression in more than one self, even as the underlying unity of the being called Yhwh endures. Other biblical authors, including those of the priestly and deuteronomic schools, completely rejected this conception. Putting greater emphasis on God’s unity, they insisted that God has only one body and one self” (1, p. 124).

“It is immediately evident that the fluidity traditions from the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East found expression in Christianity. The most obvious example of fluidity in Christian thought is the notion of the trinity” (1, p. 132).

Now, I cannot emphasize too strongly that Professor Sommer makes absolutely no reference to the literary theme of the double or to multiple personality. And, no doubt, he and other theologians would find the idea that God has multiple personality to be silly and offensive. So let me make it clear that I am not making that argument. This post and this blog have no theological agenda.

I just find it interesting that an ancient controversy about the nature of God is the same controversy we have about the nature of people. And I wonder if, besides this blog, any other article or book on the literary theme of the double, etc., has mentioned the Bible.

1. Benjamin D. Sommer. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel. Cambridge University Press, 2009.