![]() World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Sign up for The New Statesman’s newsletters Tick the boxes of the newsletters you would like to receive. There is even solid archaeological evidence for the god of Israel, like his earlier counterparts in the region, originally having a female divine consort. The biblical god may have had a comprehensive theological makeover by the time the Hebrew Scriptures reached their present form, but the untamed alpha male deity of archaic west Asian myth is never far away. ![]() It belongs in a mindset for which the divine is a hugely magnified version of physical human dominance – male (and sexually predatory), aggressive, imagined in terms of conventional masculine glamour. Language that most religious readers have unreflectively treated as vaguely poetic licence (God’s right arm, the soles of his feet, his internal organs, his face, his breath, even his genitals) is shown to be rooted in mythical conventions that cannot be taken as straightforwardly metaphorical. Stavrakopoulou – with evident relish – takes us through a catalogue of bodily actions and bodily organs associated with the biblical god of Israel. More startlingly, he is spoken of with much the same level of intensely physical vocabulary as the gods of the earlier pantheon. In Syria, his name is Ba’al, “the master” – the deity who, in the Bible, is regularly cast as the archetypal false god who lures the people of Israel into apostasy.īut in fact the texts of Hebrew scripture depict the god of Israel as behaving in almost exactly the same way as Ba’al: he is a storm-god, a warrior, the conqueror of primeval chaos, a habitue of sacred mountain tops such as Sinai. This deputy is often encountered and worshipped on wild and exposed mountain tops. The “high god”, El, presides over a heavenly court of deities he has a divine consort and a son or deputy who is depicted as a military champion, often a storm-spirit, subduing the primordial sea monster so as to bring order to the world. The details vary across the region, but a clear pattern emerges. Her book God: An Anatomy – consistently lively, despite its considerable length – takes us back behind the biblical texts to the world of west Asian religion and mythology in the second millennium BCE and earlier a world opened up dramatically in the last 100 years by a cluster of major archaeological discoveries in Syria, Iraq, Israel and Palestine. This is a standard summary of the mainstream Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) understanding of divine transcendence, but one that, as Francesca Stavrakopoulou, professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter, insists, is a very long way from the language of much of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. ![]() A classical 16th-century statement of the doctrine of the Church of England declares that God is “without body, parts or passions”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |