 Two consequences in particular arise for masculinity in a religious system that imagines a male deity with a phallus. First, the dilemma of homoerotic desire is posed when men worship a male God in a culture based on heterosexual complementarity. Although the expression of divine-human intimacy is couched in the language of male-female complementarity, it is males, not females, who enter into the covenantal marriage with the deity. Collectively, Israelite men were constituted discursively as “she”, and said to be “whoring” when they strayed from monotheism (monogamy) into idolatry (adultery). Suppression of the homoerotic impulse in the divine-human relationship, however, could take several forms: hiding and veiling the body of God through prohibitions against depicting God; feminizing Israelite males so that they could assume the role of God’s wife; and exaggerating the way in which women are “other” so as to minimize the ways in which men are made into others of God.