Numbers 6:25, the priestly (Aaronic) blessing, prays that 'the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you' — attributing a literal, shining face to God.

The premise that liturgical centrality implies literal-anatomical intent gets the semantics of panim ('face') exactly backwards. 'Face' is, by a wide margin, one of the most idiomatically fossilized words in Biblical Hebrew for presence, favor, and personal attention — it occurs roughly 2,100 times in the Hebrew Bible, the overwhelming majority in constructions ('before the face of,' 'to seek someone's face,' 'to hide one's face,' 'the face of the earth,' 'the face of the deep') that carry no anatomical content whatsoever even when applied to humans, let alone to God. 'The LORD make his face shine upon you' sits in exact synonymous parallelism within the blessing itself with 'the LORD bless you and keep you' (v.24) and 'the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace' (v.26) — three couplets that Hebrew poetic parallelism structures as restatements of a single idea (favor, protection, peace) in different idiomatic dress, not three distinct claims about blessing, facial illumination, and postural head-lifting as separate divine acts. Reading 'face' with anatomical literalism here, while conceding (as any careful reader must) that 'lift up his countenance' two lines later cannot possibly mean a literal head-tilt, is inconsistent: the same poetic register governs both lines, and consistency requires reading both idiomatically. This is precisely the case where Aquinas's analogical account earns its keep rather than functioning as a rescue device invented for the occasion: 'face' predicated of God in the blessing tracks a real similarity — the warmth, attentiveness, and favorable regard a human face turned toward someone (rather than turned away, in anger or indifference) communicates — without requiring God to possess a literal countenance capable of photonic emission. The concrete, embodied vocabulary is chosen because it is the vocabulary any human hearer immediately and viscerally understands (we still instinctively read 'turning your face toward/away from someone' as caring/rejecting, cross-culturally, independent of any theology), which is exactly why it was chosen for a blessing meant to be received emotionally and existentially by ordinary worshippers, not filed as a metaphysics lecture.

The priestly blessing's use of embodied, relational face-language is a strength of the doctrine of accommodation, not a liability: Israel's worship life was built to communicate God's personal, favorable attention to ordinary people in language drawn from the most immediate register of human relational experience — a face turned toward you in welcome versus turned away in rejection — precisely because the reality being communicated (real personal care, real covenantal favor) is genuinely, not merely metaphorically, true of God, even though the vehicle (a literal shining countenance) is not. That the doctrine of divine incorporeality never stopped Israel's liturgy from using this language shows the two are not actually in tension in the way the objection assumes; incorporeality was never meant to drain relational, personal language of God out of worship, only to correctly locate what kind of truth that language conveys.