The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel

The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel
Author: Benjamin D. Sommer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2009-06-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1139477781

Sommer utilizes a lost ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity according to which a god has more than one body and fluid, unbounded selves. Though the dominant strains of biblical religion rejected it, a monotheistic version of this theological intuition is found in some biblical texts. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers inherited this ancient way of thinking; ideas such as the sefirot in Kabbalah and the trinity in Christianity represent a late version of this theology. This book forces us to rethink the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, as this notion of divine fluidity is found in both polytheistic cultures (Babylonia, Assyria, Canaan) and monotheistic ones (biblical religion, Jewish mysticism, Christianity), whereas it is absent in some polytheistic cultures (classical Greece). The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel has important repercussions not only for biblical scholarship and comparative religion but for Jewish-Christian dialogue.

The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel

The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel
Author: Benjamin D. Sommer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2009-06-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0521518725

Sommer utilizes a recovered ancient perception of divinity as having more than one body, fluid and unbounded selves.

Jewish Concepts of Scripture

Jewish Concepts of Scripture
Author: Benjamin D Sommer
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2012-10-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814724604

What do Jews think scripture is? How do the People of the Book conceive of the Book of Books? In what ways is it authoritative? Who has the right to interpret it? Is it divinely or humanly written? And have Jews always thought about the Bible in the same way? In seventeen cohesive and rigorously researched essays, this volume traces the way some of the most important Jewish thinkers throughout history have addressed these questions from the rabbinic era through the medieval Islamic world to modern Jewish scholarship. They address why different Jewish thinkers, writers, and communities have turned to the Bible—and what they expect to get from it. Ultimately, argues editor Benjamin D. Sommer, in understanding the ways Jews construct scripture, we begin to understand the ways Jews construct themselves.

The World of Ancient Israel

The World of Ancient Israel
Author: Society for Old Testament Study
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 1991-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521423922

Encapsulating as it does research that has been undertaken on the sociological, anthropological and political aspects of the history of ancient Israel, this important book is designed to follow in the tradition of works in the series sponsored by The Society for Old Testament Study which began with the publication of The People and the Book in 1925. The World of Ancient Israel is especially concerned to explore in greater depth than comparable studies the areas and degrees of overlap between approaches to the subject of Old Testament research adopted by scholars and students of theology and the social sciences. Increasing numbers of scholars have recognised the valuable insights that can be gained from a cross-disciplinary approach, and it is becoming clear that the early biblical traditions about the formation of the Israelite state must be examined in the light of comparative anthropology if useful historical conclusions are to be drawn from them.

Gods in Dwellings

Gods in Dwellings
Author: Michael B. Hundley
Publisher: Society of Biblical Literature
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781589839182

In this book devoted exclusively to temples and perceptions of the divine presences that inhabit them, Michael B. Hundley focuses on the official religions of the ancient Near East and explores the interface between the human and the divine within temple environs. Hundley identifies common ancient Near Eastern temple systems and examines issues that include what temple structures communicate, how temples were understood to function, temple ideology, the installation of divine presence in a temple, the connection between presence and physical representation, and human service to the deity. Drawing on architectural and spatial theory, ritual theory, theories of language, art history, archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and comparative studies, Hundley offers a single interpretive lens through which to view temple worship. Features: A close examination of temples in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hittite Anatolia, and Syria-Palestine An interdisciplinary treatment of architecture, language, ritual, and art A dual focus on how a deity's divine presence connects to space and art and how human service to the deity maintains the deity's active presence

God in Translation

God in Translation
Author: Mark S. Smith
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2010-06-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0802864333

God in Translation offers a substantial, extraordinarily broad survey of ancient attitudes toward deities, from the Late Bronze Age through ancient Israel and into the New Testament. Looking closely at relevant biblical texts and at their cultural contexts, Mark S. Smith demonstrates that the biblical attitude toward deities of other cultures is not uniformly negative, as is commonly supposed. He traces the historical development of Israel's "one-god worldview, " linking it to the rise of the surrounding Mesopotamian empires. Smith's study also produces evidence undermining a common modern assumption among historians of religion that polytheism is tolerant while monotheism is prone to intolerance and violence.

The Bible Unearthed

The Bible Unearthed
Author: Israel Finkelstein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2002-03-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0743223381

In this groundbreaking work that sets apart fact and legend, authors Finkelstein and Silberman use significant archeological discoveries to provide historical information about biblical Israel and its neighbors. In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible—the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire—reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts. Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today.

Controlling Corporeality

Controlling Corporeality
Author: Jon L. Berquist
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813530161

In this beautifully written book, Jon L. Berquist guides the reader through the Hebrew Bible, examining ancient Israel's ideas of the body, the unstable roles of gender, the deployment of sexuality, and the cultural practices of the time. Conducting his analysis with reference to contemporary theories of the body, power, and social control, Berquist offers not only a description and clarification of ancient Israelite views of the body, but also an analysis of how these views belong to the complex logic of ancient social meanings.

God's Body

God's Body
Author: Andreas Wagner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567655989

Images of the body in ancient Near Eastern civilizations are radically different from body images today, which in turn creates significant consequences for our understanding of the biblical notion of God's human shape and the frequent and widespread misconceptions therein. Andreas Wagner illuminates such frequent and widespread misconceptions, and reveals the sometimes distant pictorial world of ancient body images. He contrasts these with contemporary models and makes the matter of the Old Testament concept of God's human form accessible and clear. Wagner begins by introducing readers to aspects of anthropomorphism, the study of body parts, and Israel's basic understanding of the human body. He then turns specifically to the body of God, analysing why and how certain body parts are emphasized or regularly employed in the biblical text when it tries to describe God. Wagner draws out the theological aspects of the ways in which God's body is described as well as considering the diverse range of ancient Near Eastern perspectives on God, and the ways in which ancient cultures constructed and understood deities. Wagner concludes by looking at how the depiction of God in the Old Testament fits with the concept of mankind made in God's image. Enhanced by over fifty illustrations, God's Body will lead the debate in biblical anthropomorphism for years to come.

The Biblical Cosmos

The Biblical Cosmos
Author: Robin A. Parry
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2014-10-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630876224

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.