340 JILL MIDDLEMAS and Andreas Wagner 68 have shown that divine descriptors neither pre- sent the whole image of the deity nor represent God in a particular gender. This point has been stressed by Mayer Gruber in her work on female presentations of the deity in the Old Testament 69. When we think of the imago Dei, then, in order to be consistent with the aniconic intentions of the Priestly Writer and also with the representations of the divine image in the Old Testament prophetic lit- erature, we must bear in mind the genders male and female. When fo- cusing on the equivalence of God and the human shape, we can reflect on metaphors about divine majesty, relationality, compassion (womb- like love) 70, for example 71, or on how human beings function as royal representatives of the divine in the world. At the same time, greater at- tention to prophetic literary aniconic strategies more generally reveals that the divine image was not only conceptualized as human. God represents an entity that is also distinct from humanity — the divine image is something other, not entirely graspable by the categories at our disposal. The awareness of God’s otherness ensures divine holi- ness. The focus on prophetic and priestly approaches to the divine im- age has uncovered aniconic rhetorical strategies that actually support conceptions of the imago Dei in a human shape. At the same time, however, the rich diversity of biblical language related to the divine image in the prophetic literature destabilizes a fixed form and thus dissuades the creation of an idol. Theologische fakultät der universität Zürich Jill MIDDLEMAS Kirchgasse, 9 CH-8001 Zürich 68 A. WAGNER, Gottes Körper. Zur alttestamentlichen Vorstellung der Men- schengestaltigkeit Gottes (Gütersloh 2010). 69 M.I. GRuBER, “The Motherhood of God in Second Isaiah”, RB 90 (1983) 351-359. 70 So, TRIBLE, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 38-56. 71 This is one of the insights of the approach to metaphor by T.E. fRETHEIM, The Suffering of God. An Old Testament Perspective (OBT; Philadelphia, PA 1984), who focuses on interpersonal divine metaphors.