God incorporated: Feasting on the divine presence in ancient Judaism

This study is concerned with "eating" metaphors employed in ancient Jewish literature to describe a visionary encounter with God. "Feasting one's eyes" upon the divine presence or receiving nourishment from the splendor of the shekhinah is a motif that appears frequently both in the writings of Philo and in Rabbinic Midrash, and appears to be exegetically derived from Exodus 24:11, where Moses along with Aaron and his sons "envisioned God and ate and drank." I suggest in the dissertation that this metaphor derives from the sacrificial cult meal, where priests would consume offerings in the presence of God. In support of this thesis, I examine cultic sacrifice and visionary mysticism as two typologies of religious experience in ancient Judaism, demonstrating their inter-connectedness through the example of the divine banquet.;Eating or feasting functions symbolically to represent the culminating moment of both sacrificial and visionary events. I suggest that through an analysis of the function of meal imagery in both sacrificial and visionary narratives, we are able to identify an important point of intersection between two very different modes of ancient religious experience. I contend that the link between sacrifice and anthropomorphic vision is so fundamental that a full understanding of each is only possible through a consideration of the other. Indeed, I argue in this study that the sacrificial cult meal is ultimately transformed by Jewish tradition, through metaphor, into a visionary, eschatological event.