Psalm 18:9 says God 'bowed the heavens and came down; thick darkness was under his feet' — implying God has feet, i.e. a physical body located in space, which contradicts the doctrine that God is incorporeal.

This is a fair question and deserves a real answer, not a one-line dismissal — and part of the honest answer is a concession: a strand of critical Hebrew Bible scholarship, most substantially Benjamin Sommer's *The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel*, argues that the earliest strata of Israelite religion may have conceived of Yahweh as possessing a genuinely fluid, multiply-manifestable body not categorically unlike other ANE storm-and-warrior deities, with stricter incorporeality developing later, especially in Second Temple and rabbinic theology. That is a real scholarly position, not a strawman, and Psalm 18 — an archaic royal theophany hymn with close affinities to Ugaritic storm-god (Baal) language, where Yahweh 'rides on a cherub,' the earth 'reeled and rocked,' smoke goes up from his nostrils, and thick darkness is under his feet as he 'bowed the heavens and came down' — is exactly the kind of text Sommer builds on. Fair enough. But the objection overstates what this concession buys it, for two reasons. First, on the grammar and genre of Psalm 18 itself: this is storm-theophany poetry (paralleled almost verbatim in 2 Samuel 22), a genre that borrows the stock combat/storm imagery of the wider ANE poetic idiom — cherub-riding, smoke, fire, thick cloud — to describe Yahweh's decisive intervention in David's deliverance, not a physiological description offered as information about divine anatomy. 'Feet' here functions the way it does throughout Hebrew poetic parallelism generally: as the lower/near term paired with 'heavens' as the upper/far term, marking the totality of Yahweh's action from transcendence (bowing the heavens) to intimate nearness (darkness under his feet, i.e., his immediate proximity to the psalmist). No hearer of this hymn is meant to conclude anything about pedal anatomy; they are meant to conclude that God acted decisively and terrifyingly close by. Second, and more importantly: the same textual tradition that produces this kind of theophanic language also contains its own explicit theological self-correction against inferring literal divine form from exactly this genre of theophany. Deuteronomy 4:15–16, reflecting on the Horeb theophany itself, states: 'you saw no form (temunah) when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire... so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure.' This is not a later, foreign philosophical import correcting the tradition from outside — it is the tradition correcting itself from within, using the very theophany narratives that supply the anthropomorphic vocabulary as the occasion for the warning. Likewise 1 Kings 8:27, Solomon's dedication of the Temple, states flatly: 'heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.' A deity who cannot be spatially contained, in a text sitting comfortably alongside vivid anthropomorphism, is not a deity whose 'feet' are meant literally. The best explanation of this internal pattern — anthropomorphic theophany language plus explicit textual warnings against inferring a literal form from it — is not naive corporeal belief that the tradition immediately and unselfconsciously contradicts itself on, but deliberate, controlled anthropomorphism: describing God's transcendent action in the only vocabulary available to embodied creatures, while simultaneously and repeatedly signaling that the vocabulary is not to be read as anatomy. Thomas Aquinas gives the technical account of why this works: God-language is neither univocal (the exact same sense as when applied to creatures) nor equivocal (a totally unrelated, arbitrary sense) but analogical (*Summa Theologiae* I, q.13) — 'feet' predicated of God tracks a real similarity (God's active, decisive nearness and condescension to act within creation) without God literally possessing pedal extremities, exactly as *Summa Theologiae* I, q.3 rules out any bodily composition in God on independent metaphysical grounds (a body is composed of parts and located in space; a first cause of all spatial and material reality cannot itself be one more spatial, material thing).

The doctrine of divine accommodation is not an ad hoc rescue device invented to explain away embarrassing texts; it is the church's and the synagogue's own long-standing account of how finite, embodied creatures can meaningfully speak of an infinite, non-spatial God at all. Calvin's phrase — God 'lisps' to us as a nurse lisps to an infant — captures the same point Aquinas makes technically: analogical predication is the only way language about God is possible without collapsing into either pure agnosticism (nothing can be truly said of God) or crude idolatry (God is exactly like us, only bigger). 'His feet' communicates real truth — God's decisive, near, effective action in the world — in the only register a language built by and for embodied creatures can supply. Far from being a weakness, this is precisely what we should expect from special revelation genuinely accommodated to human capacity (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16 on Scripture's God-breathed but historically and culturally embedded character), and it explains, better than either 'naive polytheistic remnant' or 'internally contradictory text,' why the same authors who write of feet and hands also insist heaven cannot contain God.