Ezekiel 1:27-28 describes 'the loins' of the divine glory-figure on the throne-chariot — implying God has genitals, i.e. a literal humanlike body, sexed and physical.

This is worth taking seriously exactly because it is Ezekiel, writing carefully and late, and not an offhand poetic line. But a close reading of Ezekiel's own grammar undercuts the objection rather than supporting it. Look at the density of hedging language in these two verses alone: 'upward from what appeared like (kemar'eh) the loins I saw something like (keeyn) gleaming amber... something that looked like (kemar'eh) fire... downward from what looked like (mimar'eh) the loins I saw something that looked like fire... This was the appearance of the likeness (demut mar'eh) of the glory of the LORD.' That is not anatomical reportage; it is a triple- and quadruple-hedged simile stacked on top of another simile stacked on top of another simile — 'the appearance of the likeness of the glory,' not 'the loins of the LORD.' Even the noun used, mothnayim ('loins/waist'), functions in the vision as a structural pivot point for describing a field of fire and light (amber above, fire below), not as an anatomical claim about generative organs; nothing in the Hebrew text says or implies genitalia, and the NRSV rendering 'loins' should not be read as smuggling in more specificity than 'the waist region' as a boundary marker between two zones of visionary light. Ezekiel's grammar is, in fact, doing exactly the accommodation work classical theism says this kind of language is for. A prophet capable of this much syntactic caution — piling up 'like,' 'appearance of,' 'likeness of' precisely at the point of greatest anthropomorphic specificity — is not naively reporting divine anatomy; he is straining the furthest limits of Hebrew visionary language to communicate an overwhelming, humanlike-but-not-human glory while explicitly signaling, at every clause, that this is analogical, veiled representation, not direct perception of a literal body. Ezekiel's response confirms this: he does not describe a being he has anatomically inspected; he 'falls on his face,' the standard prophetic response to overwhelming, category-breaking glory, not to seeing an ordinary embodied figure. This fits the wider pattern honestly: Sommer is right that Ezekiel's vision, along with Isaiah 6 and the Sinai theophanies, stands in continuity with older ANE throne-theophany iconography (the divine figure enthroned amid a chariot-cherub complex has real Mesopotamian and Syro-Palestinian art-historical parallels), and it would be dishonest to deny that continuity. But Ezekiel deploys that inherited visual idiom under maximal linguistic control, precisely because — as a priest trained in the Zadokite tradition that also produced 1 Kings 8:27's 'heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you' — he needs his readers to receive an overwhelming vision of glory without concluding God is a physical, sexed being enthroned somewhere in the sky. The vision is functioning the way Aquinas says analogical language must function: conveying a real, non-identical likeness (glory, kingship, personal presence) through the only representational vocabulary available, hedged at every turn against literal identification.

Read on its own terms, Ezekiel 1 is a text about the mobility and transcendence of the divine glory (kavod) — the whole point of the wheeled, multi-directional throne-chariot is that Yahweh's presence is not fixed to one temple or one locale the way housed cult-images were, which is precisely Ezekiel's pastoral point to exiles cut off from the Jerusalem temple: God's glory travels with them to Babylon. A God who needs to be described in such hedged, provisional, glory-centered terms specifically because he cannot be reduced to a fixed cultic image is the strongest possible textual evidence against, not for, the crude embodied-deity reading — it is a vision engineered to convey real presence without encouraging idolatrous concretization, and Ezekiel's own later oracles against idol-worship (e.g., Ezekiel 8) confirm that guarding against exactly that concretization is his central concern.