God: An Anatomy
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Beautifully written, passionately argued and frequently controversial, God: An Anatomy is cultural history on a grand scale.
Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had seventy children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a minor storm deity, known as Yahweh. Yahweh had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals. He gorged on food and wine, wrote books, and took walks and naps. But he would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions.
But as Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou reveals, God’s cultural DNA stretches back centuries before the Bible was written, and persists in the tics and twitches of our own society, whether we are believers or not. The Bible has shaped our ideas about God and religion, but also our cultural preferences about human existence and experience; our concept of life and death; our attitude to sex and gender; our habits of eating and drinking; our understanding of history. Examining God’s body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, she shows how the Western idea of God developed. She explores the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world. And in doing so she analyses not only the origins of our oldest monotheistic religions, but also the origins of Western culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biblical scholar Stavrakopoulou convincingly argues for understanding the Christian God as an embodied being in this fascinating comparative mythology. Despite encountering "broad assumption" among Jewish and Christian insistence that God is "formless," Stavrakopoulou found "ancient texts conjured a startlingly corporeal image of God." She demonstrates this through biblical appearances, alongside the mythologies of an embodied God from the ancient Hebrews' neighbors. Stavrakopoulou starts with the feet and moves upwards, using body parts as jumping-off points to explore cultural and theological issues. She considers genitals (including Ezekiel's vision of God's genitals filling the temple); the torso and organs (with a section on the heart as the seat of cognition); and arms, hands, and head (including an eye-opening exploration of the power of scent in rituals). She moves into what those parts can do, as, when discussing hands, she considers the ancient power invested in writing. By placing Hebrew stories in their local context, she explains what body parts meant to the original writers of the Bible, and offers insights into the reasons and methods that later theologians employed to diminish God's corporeality. Stavrakopoulou writes with the fluidity of a seasoned storyteller, using ample footnotes, but never getting weighed down by academic jargon. This is a provocative tour de force.
