In Exodus 33:23, God tells Moses 'you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen' — implying God has a literal front and back, a physically oriented body that Moses partially views from a specific vantage point in a rock crevice.

The staging is indeed concrete, and it would be dishonest to flatten that away — Exodus 33:18-23 is deliberately one of the most physically vivid theophany narratives in the Torah, and it earns its place in Sommer's case for early Israelite belief in a manifestable divine presence with real spatial properties. But the passage's own function within its context works against the corporealist reading rather than for it. The entire episode is triggered by Moses asking to see God's kavod, his 'glory' (v.18) — not his 'body' — and God's reply is that 'no one shall see me and live' (v.20), which is the operative theological claim of the passage: direct, unmediated encounter with God's essence is fatal to a creature, so what Moses receives is a mediated, partial, protected disclosure, staged specifically to prevent full exposure. The 'hand' covering Moses and the 'back' (achorai, more precisely 'my after-part' or 'what comes after me,' i.e., the trailing edge of the glory's passage) versus 'face' (panim, God's direct, personal presence/self) is doing theological work about the limits of creaturely capacity to bear divine self-disclosure, not supplying an anatomy report. Notably, 'panim' (face) is itself one of the most thoroughly idiomatic words in Biblical Hebrew for presence-in-general — 'to seek God's face' means to seek his favorable presence, 'God's face shone on someone' means he was gracious to them (compare directly Numbers 6:25 in the priestly blessing) — with essentially no residual literal-facial content in ordinary usage. Reading achorai/panim here with flat anatomical literalism, while reading the same panim elsewhere (constantly) as pure idiom for presence/favor, is an equivocation: the objection has to smuggle in a literalism for this one occurrence of the word-pair that it would never apply to the word's dozens of other biblical occurrences. What the passage does communicate, and communicates precisely by using spatial staging, is a real theological point about degrees and modes of revelation: some disclosure of God is survivable and given (his 'goodness,' his name/character proclaimed in 34:6-7, immediately following), while unmediated encounter with the fullness of who God is, is not survivable for a finite creature — 'you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.' The narrative is anthropomorphic precisely in order to make an anti-anthropomorphic point: even Moses, the most privileged of all the prophets ('whom the LORD knew face to face,' Deuteronomy 34:10, itself using the same idiom non-literally), does not get literal, direct access to God's essence.

This text is best read as a controlled narrative about the asymmetry between infinite Creator and finite creature — the very asymmetry classical theism's incorporeality doctrine is trying to protect. A God who could simply be walked around and inspected front and back like a physical object would be a being among beings, not the transcendent ground of all being; Exodus 33 dramatizes exactly why that is not what Israel's God is, by showing that even the most favored human being cannot bear full, direct disclosure. The following verses (34:6-7), where what Moses actually receives is a proclamation of the divine name and moral character ('merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness'), confirm that the substance of the theophany is character/glory disclosure, not a body-viewing.