The book presents this picture with a wealth of scholarly detail and much gusto (and occasional tabloidish hype). Stavrakopoulou is a distinguished scholar of the archaeological record and summarises its data with skill. But the interpretation of her material raises some large questions. We are told more than once that this book introduces us to “the real God of the Bible” – a phrase whose oddity becomes more marked the more you think about it. “The Bible” is a set of very diverse texts bundled together as a canonical unit by Jewish and Christian believers. It is certainly right to protest, as Stavrakopoulou does, when the traces of mythical language are ignored or blandly sanitised by pious reading; but that cannot mean that the mythical substrate is somehow “the real thing” as opposed to what later editors do with these traditions. The idea that the best reading of any text or tradition is one that privileges the oldest stratum needs challenging. The nagging issue? Probably at least 80 percent of endnotes refer to Bible passages. FOOTnotes — using that word correctly — would have been MUCH more convenient. (In-line citations, common at least in US biblical criticism writings, would have been better yet.) In a certain number of cases, I was familiar with the verse, even in Stavrakopoulou’s translation. But, I couldn’t remember the exact Bible passage. Seriously, this came close to losing the book a star by itself. She dares to argue, textually, that Eve had sex with God. The verse in question is Genesis 4:1, in the Revised Standard Version, “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord’.” At issue are the words Eve speaks. The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh translates them, “I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord.” Robert Alter translates, “I have got me a man with the Lord.” Note that Alter omits the word “help”, which, in fact, is absent from the Hebrew. Stavrakopoulou omits it too but goes a large step further: “I have procreated a man with Yahweh.” The Hebrew here is qnyty [I have gotten/gained/got me/procreated] ‘yš [man] ‘t [with] yhwh [Lord/Yahweh]. Critics have long noted a bit of wordplay in the verb Eve speaks inasmuch as qnyty is lexically linked to qyn (“Cain”) around the root notion “to forge.” So, then, there are two grounds for Stavrokopoulou’s move from the metaphorical to the literal: first, help is absent from the original; second, the verb hints that Eve did indeed do or perhaps “forge” something with Yahweh. Here I found myself thinking of the first verse in the Book of Jeremiah. In the King James Version, “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee.” Stavrakopoulou’s “procreate” is a carefully chosen word, for Yahweh’s imagined procreative interaction with Eve, or any later pregnant woman, may be quite physical without necessarily entailing intercourse, and Stavrakopoulou never claims otherwise. However, are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.

In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; In the image of his own body, male and female, created he them. … And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his own image, and called his name Seth. (Moses 6:8–10). Donne seems in his 19th “Expostulation” simply to praise the Lord, but a polemic is clearly to be heard between the lines. Born Catholic (he accepted Anglican ordination only in his early 40s), Donne intends to praise metaphorical and figurative language in itself by praising it in his Creator. Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist and derivatively Puritan guise, celebrated as the only proper reading of scripture the literal, “plain sense” reading, which Donne concedes in his first sentence is sometimes the proper reading. It was the rejection of the metaphorical, the figurative and, above all, the allegorical so celebrated by Christianity down to the West European 16th century that crucially enabled the Protestant Reformation’s return to the alleged “plain sense” of primitive Christianity. John Donne begs artfully to differ. First up is The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. Tell us why this one made the shortlist—what makes it one of the best history books of the year? God: An Anatomy, written by Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, is very useful. Here, she argues for a corporeal view of God in the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Bible. Numerous passages are provided to support her thesis as she moves from looking at those which focus on his feet, to his legs, torso and finally head. The book is useful for exploring how language about God should be understood (via analogy, symbols, the via negativa or something else). It also provides further thought for units focusing on the attributes of God, especially discussions surrounding whether the philosophical concept of God is supported by the Bible.David Noel Freedman, “The Status and Role of Humanity in the Cosmos According to the Hebrew Bible,” in On Human Nature: The Jerusalem Center Symposium, ed. TrumanG. Madsen, David Noel Freedman, and Pam Fox Kuhlken (Ann Arbor, MI: Pryor Pettengill Publishers, 2004), 16–17, as cited in Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, In God’s Image and Likeness 1: Creation, Fall, and the Story of Adam and Eve, updated ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Eborn Books, 2014), 123, cf. pp. 130–131 n.2-28. See BrantA. Gardner, Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), 6:191–194; AaronP. Schade and MatthewL. Bowen, The Book of Moses: From the Ancient of Days to the Latter Days(Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book; Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2021), 134–137. Here, the premortal Christ reveals that humanity was created in the image of His spirit body, which has the same form and appearance as His future body of flesh. Similarly, Joseph Smith’s inspired revision of Genesis 1:26–27, now canonized as part of the book of Moses, indicates that humankind is in the image of the premortal Christ, who in turn is Himself in the image of the Father: Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis: Through Rabbinic Tradition and Modern Scholarship(New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1966), 15–16.

The clear implication of humanity—both male and female—being created in God’s image is that all men and women are the offspring of God. Halton argues, citing Genesis 5:1–3, “We look like the divine because we are God’s offspring.” 14Prophets and apostles and other servants of the Lord have repeatedly taught the importance of this solemn truth. For instance, President HughB. Brown taught: One of the most remarkable historians and communicators working today.” —Dan Snow, author of On This Day in History El, not Yahweh, was most likely the first god of the people of Israel. But early in the first millennium BCE, Yahweh displaced him. This Yahweh is the god whom Francesca Stavrakopoulou – professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the university of Exeter – anatomises. He is not the perfect, abstract, immaterial being of modern conception; his is a visceral presence with an all too corporeal reality and many of the flaws that flesh is heir to. W]e note that humanity occupies a unique status in contrast with all the other created beings on the earth: being made in the image and according to the likeness of God. The basic likeness is in physical appearance, as the study of the etymology and usage of both terms shows. … These terms are used in cognate languages of statues representing gods and humans in contemporary inscriptions, and certainly the intention is to say that God and man share a common physical appearance. 8 What the judges said: “An engaging and often moving account of how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. A sparkling book.”Before we get into discussing what you and your fellow Wolfson History Prize judges regard as the best history books of 2022, have you noticed among them any particular approach to history or way of dealing with the past that is particularly original or interesting? Professor Carol Gilligan’s theory, the ethics of care, provides a critique of deontological and consequential theories. For example, questioning whether actions are right if they can be universalised, or if they benefit the majority. She suggests instead this should be based on whether it responds to the needs of individuals, even if this means we act differently towards others in the same situation. Similar ideas were soon championed by other Greek thinkers, most notably Plato (c. 429–347 bce), his student Aristotle (c. 384–322 bce) and subsequent generations of their elitist, learned adherents in the Graeco-Roman world, who theorized that the divine power ultimately undergirding the universe and everything in it was necessarily without a body – an incorporeal, invisible, abstract principle, force or intellect, wholly beyond and distinct from the material world. Not that these rarefied views made much of an impact on the religious lives of ordinary folk. Whether they were schooled in philosophy or not, and no matter the deities they worshipped, most people living in the Graeco-Roman world continued to envisage their gods as corporeal beings with bodies shaped like their own – much as they always had. Stavrakopoulou, a professor of ancient religion and the Hebrew Bible at the University of Exeter, argues that Judaism and, later, Christianity spiritualized the God of ancient Israel through the centuries. In so doing, once clearly anthropomorphic passages of Scripture were given completely allegorical meanings. As the author notes in the conclusion, “the real God of the Bible was an ancient Levantine deity whose footsteps shook the earth, whose voice thundered through the skies and whose beauty and radiance dazzled his worshippers.” The author presents a lengthy and well-researched tome that draws on multiple ancient sources and archaeological findings to rediscover the physicality of ancient gods and especially the bodily nature of the God of Israel. Stavrakopoulou explores this God one part at a time: feet and legs, genitals, torso, arms and hands, and, finally, head. She explores a remarkable range of Scripture in which Israel’s God is described in fully anthropomorphic terms—and often with attributes of character and action more akin to a god of Olympus than the God of modern Abrahamic religions. The God Stavrakopoulou reveals is a warrior and a lover who lives in close proximity to his people. At times, the author’s rejection of allegorical interpretations of this God is unyielding—e.g., her treatment of scriptural descriptions of God fathering his believers through his lover. Nonetheless, Stavrakopoulou provides a refreshing look at ancient Scripture and the people behind it, reminding readers that the concept of “God” in the 21st century is a world away from that of the earliest people of Israel.

Interestingly, we're never told the amount of the wager. Is itOf all these six books this one is the most accessible to the general reader. It is fascinating. It examines the fate of fallen statues of famous figures from the past.