God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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Hugh B. Brown, “ The Gospel Is for All Men,” April 1969 general conference, online at scripture.byu.edu. This portrait of God has not been lifted from obscure myths inscribed on long-abandoned clay tablets. It is drawn from the Bible itself – a book as complex as the deity it promotes, not least because the Bible is not a book at all, but a collection of books, falling into two parts. The first is the Hebrew Bible, known in Judaism as Tanakh, and in Christianity as the Old Testament, and it is an anthology of ancient texts, originally crafted as scrolls. Most of these texts are themselves complex compilations of diverse literary traditions, and the majority were composed between the eighth and second centuries bce in Judah, a small southern polity in the ancient Levant – the region we know today as Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and western Syria. In the eighth century bce, Judah was a kingdom captured by Assyria; at the beginning of the sixth century bce, it was conquered again, this time by the Babylonians. By the fifth century bce, Judah had become a Persian province, and in about 333 bce, it was incorporated into Alexander the Great’s vast empire. Some Hebrew Bible texts tell of Judah’s changing political fortunes, while others are stories about legendary heroes and myths about the very distant past. Some are collections of oracles attributed to various prophets, and others are compilations of poetry, ritual songs, prayers and teachings. But none of these texts have reached us in their ‘original’ form. Instead, all were subject to creative and repeated revision, addition, emendation and editing across a number of generations, reflecting the shifting ideological interests of their curators, who regarded them as sacred writings. It must also be remembered that the Angel of Yahweh is called a Satan in confronting Balaam in Numbers. 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.

We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come to be known as Yahweh. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; by the third century BCE his name had been declared unutterable. We know him best as God. 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. My endeavour to include more women in A Level Religious Studies led to an invitation to speak on this topic at the NATRE (National Association of Teachers of Religious Education) yearly conference, Strictly RE 2022. In particular, the talk and this blog focus on how modern female scholars can be incorporated into modules on Philosophy of Religion, Ethics and Developments in Christian Thought.God,” like God, offers a host of surprising revelations. And the timing of this award — in the season of Christmas and Hanukkah — feels strangely ordained. And yet, and yet... I dare say that the author´s insistence of taking every single word and line in the Bible literally cannot possibly be the correct approach, epecially when it comes to poems and songs. People have always relied on imagination, allegory and other means of creativity to make their point and there is no reason to believe that the ancient poets and writers did not do the same. While she clearly has a point that there are many passages in the Bible that have been "sanitized" in later centuries, she also completely refuses to entertain an idea that many of those passages CANNOT be taken literary.

Beyond sexuality and creation, she also talks about Yahweh as an embodied war leader, soaked on blood, and often shown as arguably being addicted to violence. Again, she shows plenty of ANET parallels.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. Let’s go onto the last of the best history books of 2022, Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann Although Stavrakopoulou is an atheist, she’s fascinated, even perturbed, by what Christians and Jews have done to God. In ancient times, she notes, God had a body, “a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking” physique.