God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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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.

The choice of statues is very wide ranging, geographically, including among others Stalin, George V, Lenin, Saddam Hussein and George Washington. I cannot resist pointing out that it is not surprising that the statues are all of men. Above all, it is worth reading this book for the light it shines on the function of statues today, as well as yesterday, and the book does seek to discuss the contemporary debate and the rewriting of the past by the present. It also looks at the curious absence of historical awareness on the part of many of those who are still determined to topple statues. It is a kind of a commentary, if you like, on ‘wokeness’, I think. As the military historian, Dan Snow, so rightly put it, “Like all the best historians, von Tunzelmann uses the past to explain what’s going on today”. I found this book intelligent, illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable. If you are exploring topics connected to sexual ethics, particularly going beyond a focus on heterosexuality, the work of Dr Susanna Cornwell and Marcella Althaus-Reid are both eminently relevant.But what she does have is loads and loads of examples, details, and the pleasing structure of a book divided into (body) parts. I read it all in one go, but it could easily be a book to dip in and out of. Stripping away the theological veneer of centuries of Jewish and Christian piety, this book disentangles the biblical God from his scriptural and doctrinal fetters to reveal a deity wholly unlike the God worshipped by Jews and Christians today. The God revealed in this book is the deity as his ancient worshippers saw him: a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking god, with supra-human powers, earthly passions and a penchant for the fantastic and the monstrous. It’s easy to forget that the God of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)/Christian Old Testament — who continues as God the Father for Trinitarian Christians in the New Testament — has a literal corporeal body. Fundamentalist versions of both Judaism and Christianity of course bury this deeply.

This is an extraordinary book. It’ll rewire your thinking, and it’s so readable you won’t notice till it’s too late.” — Tim Whitmarsh, author of Battling the GodsStavrakopoulou throws down a heroic crusader’s gauntlet (and takes an indefensible theoretical position) at the very opening of her book: Tellingly, the prophecies of Daniel, from the second century BCE reintroduce images of a “high god” and a second heavenly presence, superficially reminiscent of the archaic Syrian model. But here the second presence is a glorified human figure representing the struggles and sufferings of the Jewish people. This figure is received into the heavenly court as a sign of the triumph, not of the savage regional empires of the period, symbolised by giant beasts at war with each other, but of “the holy people of the Most High” – a society of properly human character, living in devotion, justice and humility. It is an image that can be perceived clearly behind some of the early Christian language about Jesus. But it originally reflects a second great thought-shift in later Hebrew writings.

And when YHWH smelled the pleasing aroma, YHWH said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.’” —(Genesis 8:21) I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD. This is a very interesting book. The Ottoman Turks were a very long-lasting and important dynasty, who ruled for seven centuries. And the book unfolds a sweeping narrative stressing the importance of the Ottoman dynasty, both in relation to Middle Eastern countries, but also its role in European history. For many Europeans for about half a millennium, the Ottomans represented the exotic, dangerous and non-Christian Orient. They were the enemy to fear. The book draws out six key moments in Ottoman history as important. It must also be remembered that the Angel of Yahweh is called a Satan in confronting Balaam in Numbers. Apparently it is possible to spend too much time over the dinner table reciting facts you have learned from this book about God's willy to your partner. That's me told.The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. In any case, what about Eve’s prior baby-making with Adam? Where, or when, did he come in? This gets glossed over as Stavrakopoulou soars wildly on into speculations about the name “Eve” as merely a title for the goddess Asherah, Asherah being Hebrew for Athirat, the spouse of the pan-Semitic high god El, and El being functionally identical with Yahweh. She infers far too much, but as for the key translation itself, she has warrant for what she does.

Without denying that there are other factors at play, Restoration scripture makes clear that humanity’s status as the image of God includesa physical resemblance to deity. In Ether 3, the brother of Jared “saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood” (Ether 3:6). Because of his great faith, “the Lord showed himself unto him” (v. 13) and said: Stavrakopoulou has taken to heart the biblical injunction to seek the face of God, and what emerges is a deity more terrifyingly alive, more damaged, more compelling, more complex than we have encountered before. More human, you might say. Let’s move on to The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill. What makes this among the best history books of 2022.Hugh B. Brown, “ The Gospel Is for All Men,” April 1969 general conference, online at scripture.byu.edu. 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. God, as he is now understood by monotheistic religions, wasn’t always a singular deity. When Sargon II of Assyria conquered Israel in the eighth century BCE, he described seizing statues of “the gods in whom they trusted”. Who were these other gods – and what was Yahweh to them? Thanks to second-millennium BCE texts from the Syrian city-state Ugarit, we know that Yahweh was once a minor storm god of a wild, mountainous region south of the Negev desert. He was part of a large pantheon of Levantine gods headed by the patriarch El and his consort Athirat. Stavrakopoulou focuses on God as a corporeal entity, so as the concept of an immaterial, invisible God that is prominent today took hold after a few decades of Christianity her account comes to an end. This is not an instantaneous process, and the idea of a bodily God persists well into the Common Era, but under Christianity it is increasing Genesis 5:1–3 echoes Genesis 1:26–27, stating “that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them,” and then adding that Adam had “a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth.” In the book of Moses, this is revised to explicitly refer to the bodilyimage of God: