What do you think?
Rate this book
God: An Anatomy
An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers--with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous.
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. Here is a portrait--arrived at through the author's close examination of and research into the Bible--of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe--and every part of the body in between--this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.
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. Here is a portrait--arrived at through the author's close examination of and research into the Bible--of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe--and every part of the body in between--this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.
Audible Audio
First published September 16, 2021
844 people are currently reading
6834 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 269 reviews
November 9, 2021
I really loved this book. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at a British university who occasionally makes programmes for TV.
In this book, she draws on her knowledge of Egyptian religion and other south-west Asian religions to help us understand the god of the Bible better. She also draws on her knowledge of Hebrew to show how Christian translators have modified the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. Old Testament), airbrushing elements of the Biblical god that don’t fit in with their theology.
She makes two key points. The first is that Christianity and Judaism are not Biblical religions; they are post-Biblical religions. Most of the Hebrew Bible was written in and refers to very different times when the concept of God was very different to the monotheistic Christian and Jewish concepts of God.
The second is that Yahweh, the god of the Bible, started life as a fairly minor storm god in a larger pantheon of gods. The major god of this pantheon was El (whose name lives on in the word Israel). The Israelites prioritised Yahweh, who over time took on El’s attributes and even seems to have acquired his wife (renamed Ashera). In the centuries before the Babylonian exile, Yahweh retained many characteristics of a pagan god, and there is strong evidence that other gods were widely worshipped by the Israelites and Judeans.
It was only after the return from Babylon that those who worshipped only Yahweh were able to centralise religious practice around him and the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Only then could true monotheism develop. As it did so, Jewish, and later Christian, thinkers found that the idea of a single, transcendent God was incompatible with the very physical god described in the Bible. It became common to see Biblical passages as analogous and esoteric, something we should not take literally but should instead read for the deeper meaning buried within. Professor Stavrakopoulou disagrees. She thinks that when the Bible’s authors described Yahweh physically, they meant exactly what they said. The case she makes is compelling.
In this book, she draws on her knowledge of Egyptian religion and other south-west Asian religions to help us understand the god of the Bible better. She also draws on her knowledge of Hebrew to show how Christian translators have modified the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. Old Testament), airbrushing elements of the Biblical god that don’t fit in with their theology.
She makes two key points. The first is that Christianity and Judaism are not Biblical religions; they are post-Biblical religions. Most of the Hebrew Bible was written in and refers to very different times when the concept of God was very different to the monotheistic Christian and Jewish concepts of God.
The second is that Yahweh, the god of the Bible, started life as a fairly minor storm god in a larger pantheon of gods. The major god of this pantheon was El (whose name lives on in the word Israel). The Israelites prioritised Yahweh, who over time took on El’s attributes and even seems to have acquired his wife (renamed Ashera). In the centuries before the Babylonian exile, Yahweh retained many characteristics of a pagan god, and there is strong evidence that other gods were widely worshipped by the Israelites and Judeans.
It was only after the return from Babylon that those who worshipped only Yahweh were able to centralise religious practice around him and the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Only then could true monotheism develop. As it did so, Jewish, and later Christian, thinkers found that the idea of a single, transcendent God was incompatible with the very physical god described in the Bible. It became common to see Biblical passages as analogous and esoteric, something we should not take literally but should instead read for the deeper meaning buried within. Professor Stavrakopoulou disagrees. She thinks that when the Bible’s authors described Yahweh physically, they meant exactly what they said. The case she makes is compelling.
December 19, 2022
“God: An Anatomy,” by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, has won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The U.K. award, worth about $2,500, honors the best nonfiction book on any historical subject.
“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.
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.
But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.”
Her investigation, more like a reclamation, takes her through the Bible text to lift up, pick apart and examine the very physical body of the supreme being described there: his feet, his hands, his face, even his private parts. What do they look like? What are the dimensions, the vital signs and especially the implications for those who organized their lives around Him? (And it’s definitely Him.)
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post's free Book Club newsletter:
https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw...
“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.
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.
But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.”
Her investigation, more like a reclamation, takes her through the Bible text to lift up, pick apart and examine the very physical body of the supreme being described there: his feet, his hands, his face, even his private parts. What do they look like? What are the dimensions, the vital signs and especially the implications for those who organized their lives around Him? (And it’s definitely Him.)
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post's free Book Club newsletter:
https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw...
October 23, 2021
Review from a none believer: A absolutely brilliant book! (I read it at the same time as I listened to the Professor herself read the book, so in one way I've read it twice.)
It starts with a quote from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, maps, a list of illustrations, a prologue and an introduction. Then it's divided into 5 parts: Feet and Legs, Genitals, Torso, Arms and Hands & Head + an epilogue. 420+ pages of God: An Anatomy, and it ends with 150+ pages of glossary, notes, bibliography, acknowledgement and an index.
It's a book that should be taught in any school that have religion as a subject. And religious people should read it too. Maybe there be less religion, and the world would be a better place!
I can't recommend this book enough! If you only read one book this year, this is the book to read!
It starts with a quote from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, maps, a list of illustrations, a prologue and an introduction. Then it's divided into 5 parts: Feet and Legs, Genitals, Torso, Arms and Hands & Head + an epilogue. 420+ pages of God: An Anatomy, and it ends with 150+ pages of glossary, notes, bibliography, acknowledgement and an index.
It's a book that should be taught in any school that have religion as a subject. And religious people should read it too. Maybe there be less religion, and the world would be a better place!
I can't recommend this book enough! If you only read one book this year, this is the book to read!
January 29, 2022
I think it needs to be said that I am a Christian who came to believe in God pretty much on her own. With that out of the way one must say that this book stands for excellent scholarship and readable writing style. I would say it may only offend those who indeed take every word in the Bible as holy and precise, with one meaning only, rather than regard the Book as a testament of the existence of God AS WELL AS a reflection of the times when it was written. Which I would argue we should. The author is a person who has never believed in any God but has always been fascinated by religion, which definitely gives her a unique position in which to present her research and interpretation. She clearly rejects most of the interpretations of the Bible and many translators on the basis that the words written in the Bible should be taken literally. She demonstrates that the way people imagined God in the ancient times was inevitably influenced by other common beliefs, sometimes drawing on even more ancient mythology. Her chief argument is that while today God tends to be viewed as an incorporeal being, He was understood in very corporeal way in the olden days. She makes a wonderful case for this! I learned a great deal about mentality of the people and society in the times during which the Bible was written and as such would heartily recommend this to anyone interested in the subject.
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.
This is a truly fascinating book which clears some of our blindspots. Ironically it has a few of its own.
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.
This is a truly fascinating book which clears some of our blindspots. Ironically it has a few of its own.
September 10, 2024
This was a great book in many ways, but a nagging issue, an overemphasis on one talking point, and what I believe is an incorrect interpretation of the Book of Job in the last chapter ultimately cost it a star. I’d rate this 3 1/2 if you let me be precise. (Since we can't do half stars, and the average rating is even higher on Yellow Satan than here, it got 3 stars there, and I reserve the right to downgrade the 4-star here.)
With that, let’s dig in.
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.
So, too, does “traditional” critical theology. Its Enlightenment basis is as willing to explain away this fact with words such as “allegory” and “anthropomorphizing.”
Wrong move, says Fransesca Stavrakopoulou in “God: An Anatomy.”
Yahweh (she seems to hint at, but doesn’t openly embrace, some version of the Midianite hypothesis) is just as embodied as Baal or Marduk. More importantly, he’s just as masculinely male, complete with penis. As part of this, she notes that “hand” as well as “foot” is often a biblical synonym for “penis,” as in other southwest Asian religious works. And Yahweh waves his penis. He wields it. He is procreative with it.
And — like Egypt’s Amen but unlike his Mesopotamian god counterparts — sometimes, Yahweh is a solo procreator. No Asherah or other female involved. Besides the Genesis 2-3 creation myth, Stavrakopoulou cites the story of Jeshurun from Deuteronomy, as well as passages from Job and Jeremiah. With Jeshurun being Israel, of course, Yahweh wasn’t literally seen as fathering each individual member of the nation. (OTOH, Dt. 32 reads more like an adoption and nurturing story than a birth story. Sidebar: Reading it with fresh eyes, it’s clearly a story written eons after Israel’s purported escape from Egypt.)
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.
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.
And, occasionally, I didn’t totally trust her translation. And, that ties with her perhaps overemphasizing not just feet, but entire legs, as euphemisms for genitals. Specifically, it was Song of Songs 5:10-16 that was a bridge too far for me. My modern translation has verse 15 as “His legs are alabaster pillars,” after verse 14 talks of the lover’s arms. She translates that as “genitals.” (That said, there are far more off the wall takes: https://explorethefaith.com/song-of-s.... That’s not only off the wall, but obviously incorrect, and I’m not prudish, nor de-bodifying. And, that comes from a group of Messianic Christian "Yeshua" nutters who apparently are into such wrong explicitness, and also have a hard-on for Rudolf Otto, among other things..) But at other times, Stavrakopoulou is willing to occasionally going beyond "literal" to "literalistic."
Then, I just don’t agree with her on the “framing” of Job.
Stavrakopoulou claims that Job knows Yahweh is assaulting him. Actually, let's not call the verbal challenges an assault, but just an interrogation.
And, taking the standard philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Job actually knows bupkis about the physical assault — his loss of family, wealth, etc. Therefore, he does not know he is under assault from the eye of god.
Plus, if we are indeed taking Job literally, of course, Yahweh and the Satan have a bet. This isn't even sloughing off evil onto the Satan, contra Stavra, as Yahweh puts limits on what he can do. And, again, as we have it today, it's a bet, not Satan punishing evil.
Interestingly, we're never told the amount of the wager. Is it for the Satan to get a day on the throne of Yahweh, a day with his feet on Yahweh's footstool, to riff on discussions by Stavra?
It must also be remembered that the Angel of Yahweh is called a Satan in confronting Balaam in Numbers.
All points to remember. (There is a “Babylonian Job” story from way back, but it doesn’t have the equivalent of a Satan in it at all; no other SW Asian myth parallels Job.) And, Job is too early, likely started, at least, in the 6th century BCE, to have been highly influenced by Zoroastrianism to lead to Satan as a dualist figure. After all, the prose opening talks of him coming before Yahweh along with “the sons of God.” Therefore, the Satan as a figure for "sloughing off" of evil from a non-Calvinist, or non-Second Isaiah Yahweh, doesn't totally ring true.
So, all in all, speaking as a semi-academic — master’s degree, knowledge of Biblical languages, etc.? I’d rate this 3 3/4 if you let me be precise.
==
Finally, although I normally don’t judge a book by its cover? In this case, like some other reviewers? Binding is HORRIBLE.
With that, let’s dig in.
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.
So, too, does “traditional” critical theology. Its Enlightenment basis is as willing to explain away this fact with words such as “allegory” and “anthropomorphizing.”
Wrong move, says Fransesca Stavrakopoulou in “God: An Anatomy.”
Yahweh (she seems to hint at, but doesn’t openly embrace, some version of the Midianite hypothesis) is just as embodied as Baal or Marduk. More importantly, he’s just as masculinely male, complete with penis. As part of this, she notes that “hand” as well as “foot” is often a biblical synonym for “penis,” as in other southwest Asian religious works. And Yahweh waves his penis. He wields it. He is procreative with it.
And — like Egypt’s Amen but unlike his Mesopotamian god counterparts — sometimes, Yahweh is a solo procreator. No Asherah or other female involved. Besides the Genesis 2-3 creation myth, Stavrakopoulou cites the story of Jeshurun from Deuteronomy, as well as passages from Job and Jeremiah. With Jeshurun being Israel, of course, Yahweh wasn’t literally seen as fathering each individual member of the nation. (OTOH, Dt. 32 reads more like an adoption and nurturing story than a birth story. Sidebar: Reading it with fresh eyes, it’s clearly a story written eons after Israel’s purported escape from Egypt.)
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.
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.
And, occasionally, I didn’t totally trust her translation. And, that ties with her perhaps overemphasizing not just feet, but entire legs, as euphemisms for genitals. Specifically, it was Song of Songs 5:10-16 that was a bridge too far for me. My modern translation has verse 15 as “His legs are alabaster pillars,” after verse 14 talks of the lover’s arms. She translates that as “genitals.” (That said, there are far more off the wall takes: https://explorethefaith.com/song-of-s.... That’s not only off the wall, but obviously incorrect, and I’m not prudish, nor de-bodifying. And, that comes from a group of Messianic Christian "Yeshua" nutters who apparently are into such wrong explicitness, and also have a hard-on for Rudolf Otto, among other things..) But at other times, Stavrakopoulou is willing to occasionally going beyond "literal" to "literalistic."
Then, I just don’t agree with her on the “framing” of Job.
Stavrakopoulou claims that Job knows Yahweh is assaulting him. Actually, let's not call the verbal challenges an assault, but just an interrogation.
And, taking the standard philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Job actually knows bupkis about the physical assault — his loss of family, wealth, etc. Therefore, he does not know he is under assault from the eye of god.
Plus, if we are indeed taking Job literally, of course, Yahweh and the Satan have a bet. This isn't even sloughing off evil onto the Satan, contra Stavra, as Yahweh puts limits on what he can do. And, again, as we have it today, it's a bet, not Satan punishing evil.
Interestingly, we're never told the amount of the wager. Is it for the Satan to get a day on the throne of Yahweh, a day with his feet on Yahweh's footstool, to riff on discussions by Stavra?
It must also be remembered that the Angel of Yahweh is called a Satan in confronting Balaam in Numbers.
All points to remember. (There is a “Babylonian Job” story from way back, but it doesn’t have the equivalent of a Satan in it at all; no other SW Asian myth parallels Job.) And, Job is too early, likely started, at least, in the 6th century BCE, to have been highly influenced by Zoroastrianism to lead to Satan as a dualist figure. After all, the prose opening talks of him coming before Yahweh along with “the sons of God.” Therefore, the Satan as a figure for "sloughing off" of evil from a non-Calvinist, or non-Second Isaiah Yahweh, doesn't totally ring true.
So, all in all, speaking as a semi-academic — master’s degree, knowledge of Biblical languages, etc.? I’d rate this 3 3/4 if you let me be precise.
==
Finally, although I normally don’t judge a book by its cover? In this case, like some other reviewers? Binding is HORRIBLE.
November 14, 2024
A great structure to examine Western Asia, Judaism, and Christianity's early history of a corporeal God. Dr. Stavrakopoulou dives into her intense dissection of God by examining religious writings looking at God's: Feet and Legs, Genitals, Torso, Arms and Hands, and Head. She gets right in there.
I grew up a Mormon so the early view of God(s) having a real body wasn't a big stretch for me. But I was impressed with the depth and exactness of her vision and she examines in detail God the Father and Jesus and those Gods that came before.
I grew up a Mormon so the early view of God(s) having a real body wasn't a big stretch for me. But I was impressed with the depth and exactness of her vision and she examines in detail God the Father and Jesus and those Gods that came before.
January 16, 2024
This is a long, thorough book on what we know of the physical characteristics of the god of the old testament. Although most christians now see god as incorporeal, that is not how he was perceived when he was first conceived. Yahweh was a minor storm god and like the Greek gods, he definitely had a body and also very human emotions. This book covers god body part for body part, based on what is in the bible, for most part.
It was in the first council of Nicaea that god was unified as one entity of three parts (the father, the son and the holy ghost) and after this of course, one physical entity was a bit unthinkable. At least compared to how it had been before.
This book doesn’t delve into what is true or not in the bible. As an atheist I of course find most of it BS, but what I mean is that the author doesn’t discuss whether historical events actually happened, or what parts of scripture have been added later. For instance, the popular “he of you that has not sinned, cast the first stone” is a later addition. This section is discussed in relation to some bodypart - probably as the word of his / god’s breath - but not that this was not in the original gospel.
Still, it was an interesting read and covered topics that I hadn’t considered before. Like the size of god’s private parts or how long his nose was.
It was in the first council of Nicaea that god was unified as one entity of three parts (the father, the son and the holy ghost) and after this of course, one physical entity was a bit unthinkable. At least compared to how it had been before.
This book doesn’t delve into what is true or not in the bible. As an atheist I of course find most of it BS, but what I mean is that the author doesn’t discuss whether historical events actually happened, or what parts of scripture have been added later. For instance, the popular “he of you that has not sinned, cast the first stone” is a later addition. This section is discussed in relation to some bodypart - probably as the word of his / god’s breath - but not that this was not in the original gospel.
Still, it was an interesting read and covered topics that I hadn’t considered before. Like the size of god’s private parts or how long his nose was.
November 14, 2021
A good book if a little long on a single subject. I have been interested in 'the' family history ever since singing some Christmas carols a few years ago and wondering what cherubs and seraphims were, non of my pals (or anyone since) seems to know much. I have been on the lookout for further enlightenment since. The book tracks big G's life story from when he first came out about 3000 years ago. Back then he was very much the family man with wife, kids maybe not a mortgage and job but very close. He also had an anatomy back then to suit. Over the years further glimpses of his body's anatomy have been reveled and become more obscure as time has gone by. But then again not much has been reviled about the anatomy of cherubs, seraphims and the rest of the family angles, arch angles (are they the same species but with differing status?), nephilim and of course the demons and their boss.
Keep on reading!
Keep on reading!
July 14, 2022
Absolutely brilliant! Could not put it down due to how interesting it was.
March 14, 2022
It is axiomatic to each of the Abrahamic faiths that God has no body. Centuries of liturgical tradition, theological reflection, philosophical disputation, and historical disruption have polished away, as best they can, any trace of particularity or compositeness in the God of the Bible, bringing the divine patron of Israel into alignment with the immaterial and utterly transcendent Absolute conceptualized by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Platonism. God can’t be a thing, say the theologians, because otherwise He would be just one thing among all the others, and could thus not be the unconditioned foundation of being itself; god would not be God. To whatever extent God was anthropomorphized by the Biblical writers, they say, this was either the product of an insufficient but developing understanding of the true nature of divinity, or else it represented a concession to the limitations of their hearers, using bodily analogies to disclose supernatural truths.
But this heavily metaphorized and intellectualized reading of scripture, so instinctually favored by Jews and Christians, is inevitably post-Biblical. It is an imposition on the Biblical texts by a later theological tradition, not a reflection of the religious understanding of the Biblical authors themselves. The latter related to their God in ways that were inescapably anatomical and interpersonal. Their God was a supersized humanoid being; one Who was only selectively visible to the worthiest of mortals, often wreathing Himself in storm clouds or compelling His worshippers to divert their gaze with His brilliant, luminescent aura, but Who was no less corporeal as a result. This was a God Who led His people into battle; Who swore oaths and made covenants with them, Who shared meals and prayed with them, Who participated in their sacrifices, walked with them, fought with them, stalked through their camps in the night; Who baited and snared the thalassic chaos monster that terrorized the peoples of the ancient near east for centuries; Who boasted an enormous appetite for food and sex commensurate with His outsized body; and Who held court from His cherubic throne in the sanctuary of Solomon’s temple: not only in the ethereal visions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, but also likely in the form of a cult statue that a few sanctified visitors could glimpse through a haze of incense and a darkness meagerly abated by lamplight.
Before He became identified with God, this deity even had a proper name: YHWH. Because the Hebrew language lacks vowels, and because from the third century BC, under the influence of Hellenism and the religious revaluation that followed the Babylonian Captivity, it became increasingly taboo to utter the Divine Name, it is unknown with any certainty how this name was pronounced—“Yahweh” is the best guess. The mere fact that the Biblical God has a proper name indicates His historical provincialism. The religious landscape of the bronze age levant was henotheistic: it contained a broad assortment of tutelary deities, overseen by a supreme god named El. This is illustrated by an ancient pericope found in Deuteronomy 32:8-9:
“When Elyon [“the Most High”] apportioned the nations,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God [or “divine sons”].
But YHWH’s [“the Lord’s”] portion is his people,
Jacob [Israel] his allotted heritage.”
Before the turn of the first millennium BC, the Israelites and Judahites likely venerated El as the head of their pantheon. The patriarchs of Genesis typically pay obeisance not to Yahweh, but to El Shaddai, a term typically translated as “God Almighty”, but which probably means something more like “El of the wilderness”, referring to a localized manifestation of the supreme god. The name Isra-el is also very telling, as it uses the name of El, rather than Yahweh, as its divine suffix. Yahweh was a bellicose storm god from the southern wildlands of Edom. With the emergence of monarchy in Israel and Judah in the early first millennium BC, Yahweh, sufficiently warlike to become patron of the new kings, gradually supplanted El as the chief deity. Having inherited El’s mantle, Yahweh also inherited many of his characteristics, including his anthroformity, as well as those of other near eastern divinities; and this legacy manifests itself abundantly within the Biblical texts.
So what was this humanoid God like? His feet were always firmly rooted in His sacred places; whether on a platform of lapis lazuli, as on His holy mountain (Ex. 24:10); or else on His footstool, the Ark of the Covenant, in the temple sanctuary (Ps. 99:1-5), where He sat enthroned, like other gods and kings, on the wings of golden cherubim. After the Babylonian Captivity of the sixth century BC, Yahweh’s stature only grew, and His throne became more elevated. He now sat on a crystalline platform borne aloft in the heavens by cherubim and spinning wheels (Ezekiel 1:4-28), and the whole world became His footstool (Is. 66:1).
Despite the bashfulness of the Biblical authors, and in defiance of the discomfort of later traditions with ascribing human sexuality to God, Yahweh was famed for His virility; and His relations with His one-time consort Asherah, and with Israel, are described with strong sexual implications. Yahweh was perhaps conceived of with a set of genitals befitting both the size of His body and the divine, creative, and life-giving capacities ascribed to the phallus by other near eastern mythologies, which likewise endowed their creating gods, like El, Enki, and Min, with large and cosmically-generative penises. “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lofty!” says Isaiah. “His shul filled the temple!” The Hebrew word shul, typically translated as “skirt” or “robe”, is used elsewhere in the scriptures (Jeremiah 13:22, Nahum 3:5) to refer obliquely to the exposure of the genitalia. Stavrakopoulou suggests that this is why the seraphim cover their “feet” with their wings, much as Ruth uncovered the “feet” of Boaz in a story that is also commonly given a sexual gloss. Maybe so; but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Nonetheless, there is no denying the sexual intensity of God’s pledge to marry Israel in Hosea:
“. . . 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.
And in that day I will fructify, declares the LORD,
I will fructify the heavens,
and they shall fructify the earth,
and the earth shall fructify the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall fructify Jezreel [literally, “he seeds”],
and I will sow her for myself in the land.” (Hosea 2:18-23)
Nor the disturbing sexual violence, metaphorical or not, that He threatened on a “whoring” Israel, imagined as a young woman, in Ezekiel 16:
“. . . I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from every side and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness . . . And I will give you into their hands, and they shall throw down your vaulted chamber and break down your lofty places. They shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful jewels and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a crowd against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. And they shall burn your houses and execute judgments upon you in the sight of many women. I will make you stop playing the whore . . .” — (Ezekiel 16:37-41)
The one-time status of Asherah as a consort of Yahweh who was often venerated alongside Him in His temples is attested both by the archaeological record and by the fact that the Deuteronomist explicitly warns his readers not to do it (Deut. 16:21). There is also a trace of Asherah’s former presence near the end of Genesis, when Jacob makes a prayer for Joseph:
“. . . the blessings of Heaven above,
The blessings of Deep crouching below;
The blessings of Breasts-and-Womb,
The blessings of your Father, warrior Most High . . .” — (Genesis 49:25-26)
The formulation of “Breasts-and-Womb” was also applied to Athirat, an older version of Asherah, in the Syrian city of Ugarit.
Yahweh ate with his worshippers when they made sacrifices to Him, taking the choice portions for Himself and leaving the rest for His priests, simultaneously communing with mortals and distinguishing Himself from them. When the waters of the great flood receded and Noah offered a great sacrifice upon leaving the ark, it was the sweet aroma of the roasting meat that stilled Yahweh’s wrath:
“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)
Yahweh’s arm was so powerful that with it He turned Leviathan from an awesome chaos demon into a pet to play with (Ps. 104:26). His physical form was said to be exceptionally beautiful, as a passage from the Song of Songs, which may have described a cult statue, attests:
“My beloved is radiant and ruddy,
Standing out among ten thousand.
His head is gold, pure gold,
His locks are curls,
Black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves,
By watercourses,
Bathed in milk,
Fitly set.
His cheeks, like beds of spices,
Pouring forth perfumes.
His lips are lilies,
Dripping liquid myrrh.
His arms are rounded gold,
Inlaid with jewels.
His genitalia are fine-worked ivory,
With inlaid lapis lazuli.
His legs are alabaster columns,
Set upon bases of gold.
Like Lebanon is his look,
Choice as the cedars.
His mouth is sweet,
And all of him desirable.” —(Song of Songs 5:10-16)
Like El, Yahweh was often depicted with horns protruding from His head, symbolizing his taurine strength and ferocity, and often used to scatter His enemies. Through Moses, He imparts these horns to Joseph:
“Let them come on the head of Joseph,
On the brow of the head of the prince among his brothers!
The firstborn of his Bull – majesty is his!
His horns are the horns of a wild ox;
With them he gores peoples,
Driving them to the ends of the earth!” — (Deuteronomy 33:16-17)
In 1 Kings, the king Jeroboam creates two “calves”, or divine bulls, to represent Yahweh, while the prophet Zedekiah wore a horned headdress to reenact God’s aforementioned promise to Joseph that He would scatter and gore the Syrian armies. This identification of Yahweh with the sacred bull was evidently a great source of irritation for the post-exilic scribal elite, which likely explains the inclusion of the infamous "golden calf" in the Exodus story.
While I don’t think most Christians would recognize Stavrakopoulou’s concluding assertion that the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ somehow led to an excessively dematerialized understanding of God (quite the contrary, in fact); and while certain passages of this book either stretch the bounds of plausibility or are cringingly “woke”, this is nonetheless an engaging, and at times fascinating, read.
But this heavily metaphorized and intellectualized reading of scripture, so instinctually favored by Jews and Christians, is inevitably post-Biblical. It is an imposition on the Biblical texts by a later theological tradition, not a reflection of the religious understanding of the Biblical authors themselves. The latter related to their God in ways that were inescapably anatomical and interpersonal. Their God was a supersized humanoid being; one Who was only selectively visible to the worthiest of mortals, often wreathing Himself in storm clouds or compelling His worshippers to divert their gaze with His brilliant, luminescent aura, but Who was no less corporeal as a result. This was a God Who led His people into battle; Who swore oaths and made covenants with them, Who shared meals and prayed with them, Who participated in their sacrifices, walked with them, fought with them, stalked through their camps in the night; Who baited and snared the thalassic chaos monster that terrorized the peoples of the ancient near east for centuries; Who boasted an enormous appetite for food and sex commensurate with His outsized body; and Who held court from His cherubic throne in the sanctuary of Solomon’s temple: not only in the ethereal visions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, but also likely in the form of a cult statue that a few sanctified visitors could glimpse through a haze of incense and a darkness meagerly abated by lamplight.
Before He became identified with God, this deity even had a proper name: YHWH. Because the Hebrew language lacks vowels, and because from the third century BC, under the influence of Hellenism and the religious revaluation that followed the Babylonian Captivity, it became increasingly taboo to utter the Divine Name, it is unknown with any certainty how this name was pronounced—“Yahweh” is the best guess. The mere fact that the Biblical God has a proper name indicates His historical provincialism. The religious landscape of the bronze age levant was henotheistic: it contained a broad assortment of tutelary deities, overseen by a supreme god named El. This is illustrated by an ancient pericope found in Deuteronomy 32:8-9:
“When Elyon [“the Most High”] apportioned the nations,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God [or “divine sons”].
But YHWH’s [“the Lord’s”] portion is his people,
Jacob [Israel] his allotted heritage.”
Before the turn of the first millennium BC, the Israelites and Judahites likely venerated El as the head of their pantheon. The patriarchs of Genesis typically pay obeisance not to Yahweh, but to El Shaddai, a term typically translated as “God Almighty”, but which probably means something more like “El of the wilderness”, referring to a localized manifestation of the supreme god. The name Isra-el is also very telling, as it uses the name of El, rather than Yahweh, as its divine suffix. Yahweh was a bellicose storm god from the southern wildlands of Edom. With the emergence of monarchy in Israel and Judah in the early first millennium BC, Yahweh, sufficiently warlike to become patron of the new kings, gradually supplanted El as the chief deity. Having inherited El’s mantle, Yahweh also inherited many of his characteristics, including his anthroformity, as well as those of other near eastern divinities; and this legacy manifests itself abundantly within the Biblical texts.
So what was this humanoid God like? His feet were always firmly rooted in His sacred places; whether on a platform of lapis lazuli, as on His holy mountain (Ex. 24:10); or else on His footstool, the Ark of the Covenant, in the temple sanctuary (Ps. 99:1-5), where He sat enthroned, like other gods and kings, on the wings of golden cherubim. After the Babylonian Captivity of the sixth century BC, Yahweh’s stature only grew, and His throne became more elevated. He now sat on a crystalline platform borne aloft in the heavens by cherubim and spinning wheels (Ezekiel 1:4-28), and the whole world became His footstool (Is. 66:1).
Despite the bashfulness of the Biblical authors, and in defiance of the discomfort of later traditions with ascribing human sexuality to God, Yahweh was famed for His virility; and His relations with His one-time consort Asherah, and with Israel, are described with strong sexual implications. Yahweh was perhaps conceived of with a set of genitals befitting both the size of His body and the divine, creative, and life-giving capacities ascribed to the phallus by other near eastern mythologies, which likewise endowed their creating gods, like El, Enki, and Min, with large and cosmically-generative penises. “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lofty!” says Isaiah. “His shul filled the temple!” The Hebrew word shul, typically translated as “skirt” or “robe”, is used elsewhere in the scriptures (Jeremiah 13:22, Nahum 3:5) to refer obliquely to the exposure of the genitalia. Stavrakopoulou suggests that this is why the seraphim cover their “feet” with their wings, much as Ruth uncovered the “feet” of Boaz in a story that is also commonly given a sexual gloss. Maybe so; but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Nonetheless, there is no denying the sexual intensity of God’s pledge to marry Israel in Hosea:
“. . . 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.
And in that day I will fructify, declares the LORD,
I will fructify the heavens,
and they shall fructify the earth,
and the earth shall fructify the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall fructify Jezreel [literally, “he seeds”],
and I will sow her for myself in the land.” (Hosea 2:18-23)
Nor the disturbing sexual violence, metaphorical or not, that He threatened on a “whoring” Israel, imagined as a young woman, in Ezekiel 16:
“. . . I will gather all your lovers with whom you took pleasure, all those you loved and all those you hated. I will gather them against you from every side and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness . . . And I will give you into their hands, and they shall throw down your vaulted chamber and break down your lofty places. They shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful jewels and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a crowd against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords. And they shall burn your houses and execute judgments upon you in the sight of many women. I will make you stop playing the whore . . .” — (Ezekiel 16:37-41)
The one-time status of Asherah as a consort of Yahweh who was often venerated alongside Him in His temples is attested both by the archaeological record and by the fact that the Deuteronomist explicitly warns his readers not to do it (Deut. 16:21). There is also a trace of Asherah’s former presence near the end of Genesis, when Jacob makes a prayer for Joseph:
“. . . the blessings of Heaven above,
The blessings of Deep crouching below;
The blessings of Breasts-and-Womb,
The blessings of your Father, warrior Most High . . .” — (Genesis 49:25-26)
The formulation of “Breasts-and-Womb” was also applied to Athirat, an older version of Asherah, in the Syrian city of Ugarit.
Yahweh ate with his worshippers when they made sacrifices to Him, taking the choice portions for Himself and leaving the rest for His priests, simultaneously communing with mortals and distinguishing Himself from them. When the waters of the great flood receded and Noah offered a great sacrifice upon leaving the ark, it was the sweet aroma of the roasting meat that stilled Yahweh’s wrath:
“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)
Yahweh’s arm was so powerful that with it He turned Leviathan from an awesome chaos demon into a pet to play with (Ps. 104:26). His physical form was said to be exceptionally beautiful, as a passage from the Song of Songs, which may have described a cult statue, attests:
“My beloved is radiant and ruddy,
Standing out among ten thousand.
His head is gold, pure gold,
His locks are curls,
Black as a raven.
His eyes are like doves,
By watercourses,
Bathed in milk,
Fitly set.
His cheeks, like beds of spices,
Pouring forth perfumes.
His lips are lilies,
Dripping liquid myrrh.
His arms are rounded gold,
Inlaid with jewels.
His genitalia are fine-worked ivory,
With inlaid lapis lazuli.
His legs are alabaster columns,
Set upon bases of gold.
Like Lebanon is his look,
Choice as the cedars.
His mouth is sweet,
And all of him desirable.” —(Song of Songs 5:10-16)
Like El, Yahweh was often depicted with horns protruding from His head, symbolizing his taurine strength and ferocity, and often used to scatter His enemies. Through Moses, He imparts these horns to Joseph:
“Let them come on the head of Joseph,
On the brow of the head of the prince among his brothers!
The firstborn of his Bull – majesty is his!
His horns are the horns of a wild ox;
With them he gores peoples,
Driving them to the ends of the earth!” — (Deuteronomy 33:16-17)
In 1 Kings, the king Jeroboam creates two “calves”, or divine bulls, to represent Yahweh, while the prophet Zedekiah wore a horned headdress to reenact God’s aforementioned promise to Joseph that He would scatter and gore the Syrian armies. This identification of Yahweh with the sacred bull was evidently a great source of irritation for the post-exilic scribal elite, which likely explains the inclusion of the infamous "golden calf" in the Exodus story.
While I don’t think most Christians would recognize Stavrakopoulou’s concluding assertion that the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ somehow led to an excessively dematerialized understanding of God (quite the contrary, in fact); and while certain passages of this book either stretch the bounds of plausibility or are cringingly “woke”, this is nonetheless an engaging, and at times fascinating, read.
January 8, 2023
I'm exceptionally torn about this book, in a way I'm often usually not. Stavrakopolou is exceptionally learned; her knowledge of South-West Asian cultures, Levantine history, Ugarit scripture and Jewish folklore is second-to-none. She really does have an excellent grip on these cultures, or at least what has been left of them. However, she consistently seems to fall down flat when it comes to actual theological analysis. She constantly speaks of how the concept of a bodily God has always been present within the Bible insofar as God actually, physically having a body for believers in these ancient times. I just don't see it as correct; it is eisegesis at best, and downright misleading at worst.
Stavrakopolou's problem, and one of all writers trying to write on any philosophical, scientific or theological matter, is that she is anti-confessional in a particularly unhelpful way. She characterised and stereotypes people within the Bible (especially Paul, where I think her analysis the weakest) means that she often has a warped view of what the scenes actually mean in praxis as to belief. Her problem with Paul is that she is completely obsessed with the idea that Paul thought that Christ was going to come back to Earth IMMEDIATELY. 1 Thessalonians is literally scorning those who believed that Christ was coming directly back to Earth, thus neglecting their Earthly duties. Paul rages against them; so, STOP!
Her initial observation within the book is that she was 'sick and tired' of all of her theology teachers at university brushing over God's body as some form of deception to detract away from 'the very real' body of God. And I won't deny that there are teachers who do also 'cloud' things they don't like to try and get their point across, but there is a reasonable point to be had that God's body is ephemeral. Rather than being exceptionally literalist (as alas Stavrakopolou is on so many occasions), I think it is always important to take an allegorical edge on Biblical exegesis. The point of God's body was that it was a function of texts humanising that which is non-understandable. It was, to steal from the ideas of Maimonides, that cultural function which allows us to relate on an intimate level something which could be so alienating as the concept of God.
Where Stavrakopolou's genius lies is in her brilliance as a history writer. She knows the texts inside-out and backwards insofar as South-West Asian cultures are concerned. She has a very keen eye for social analysis, as well as archaeological analysis- managing to relate all sorts of things, such as statues and scriptures. I liked in particular her examination of storying-identity within icons made by Mesopotamian cultures; like the depictions of Enki as a very powerful warrior.
All in all: fascinating, but alas flawed. If I could give two ratings, I would give 5 for detail, but a 2 for analysis.
Stavrakopolou's problem, and one of all writers trying to write on any philosophical, scientific or theological matter, is that she is anti-confessional in a particularly unhelpful way. She characterised and stereotypes people within the Bible (especially Paul, where I think her analysis the weakest) means that she often has a warped view of what the scenes actually mean in praxis as to belief. Her problem with Paul is that she is completely obsessed with the idea that Paul thought that Christ was going to come back to Earth IMMEDIATELY. 1 Thessalonians is literally scorning those who believed that Christ was coming directly back to Earth, thus neglecting their Earthly duties. Paul rages against them; so, STOP!
Her initial observation within the book is that she was 'sick and tired' of all of her theology teachers at university brushing over God's body as some form of deception to detract away from 'the very real' body of God. And I won't deny that there are teachers who do also 'cloud' things they don't like to try and get their point across, but there is a reasonable point to be had that God's body is ephemeral. Rather than being exceptionally literalist (as alas Stavrakopolou is on so many occasions), I think it is always important to take an allegorical edge on Biblical exegesis. The point of God's body was that it was a function of texts humanising that which is non-understandable. It was, to steal from the ideas of Maimonides, that cultural function which allows us to relate on an intimate level something which could be so alienating as the concept of God.
Where Stavrakopolou's genius lies is in her brilliance as a history writer. She knows the texts inside-out and backwards insofar as South-West Asian cultures are concerned. She has a very keen eye for social analysis, as well as archaeological analysis- managing to relate all sorts of things, such as statues and scriptures. I liked in particular her examination of storying-identity within icons made by Mesopotamian cultures; like the depictions of Enki as a very powerful warrior.
All in all: fascinating, but alas flawed. If I could give two ratings, I would give 5 for detail, but a 2 for analysis.
December 19, 2021
"The huge throne seats a diety so large his 'lower extremities' cram the santuary. Most anchient and modern translators assume it is god's robe that swamps the space. But Isaiah makes no mention of a robe."
Stavrakopoulou's book argued that most of how both Jewish and Christian society percieves god is wrong based on the writing in the bible. She useds scripture and evidence of similar gods in the area and historical record to argue god was an incredibly large, well-endowed, beautiful man with black hair, a neatly kept beard, and blood-red skin. He had a wife, Asherah. He had a father, El. He had sex with Eve and the land of Isreal. Until he gets aged in Daniel, Yahweh is a young hot-head with a tangible body. He wrestles with Jacob. He hangs out and chats with Moses.
A strange, fun book I suggest reading for anyone who wants to re-examine religion.
Stavrakopoulou's book argued that most of how both Jewish and Christian society percieves god is wrong based on the writing in the bible. She useds scripture and evidence of similar gods in the area and historical record to argue god was an incredibly large, well-endowed, beautiful man with black hair, a neatly kept beard, and blood-red skin. He had a wife, Asherah. He had a father, El. He had sex with Eve and the land of Isreal. Until he gets aged in Daniel, Yahweh is a young hot-head with a tangible body. He wrestles with Jacob. He hangs out and chats with Moses.
A strange, fun book I suggest reading for anyone who wants to re-examine religion.
Read
May 20, 2025Fascinerend boek. Wij hebben tegenwoordig de neiging om ons God heel abstract voor te stellen, na tweeduizend jaar filosofie en theologie, maar de schrijfster laat in dit boek zien hoe lichamelijk God in het Oude Testament is (net zoals veel andere goden in de antieke wereld) en wat dat betekent voor onze interpretatie van de bijbel.
July 13, 2025
dr. stavrakopoulou i was unfamiliar w your game
March 2, 2025
This book is dense with information, and I do mean dense. It becomes immediately apparent that Stavrakopoulou is a subject matter expert in ancient near eastern culture and religion, and we get to benefit from her experience as each chapter serves as a semi-contained journey which meanders through a myriad of historical and cultural touchstones.
The central thesis of this book is the notion that the biblical writers understood God corporeally, just as their contemporaries had their own bodily deities. Personally, I found her establishment of this fact fairly convincing, even though some of her interpretations of biblical passages to that effect are less so. However, her polemical bent towards Christianity is readily apparent, and at least in some places it seems to result in the assertion of things not warranted by the evidence, at least in my view (even as a non Christian).
Otherwise, the book is incredibly well written, if not a bit too meandering at times. This book took forever for me to get through because I felt as though I had to stop and take notes every few pages. It was the literary equivalent of drinking from a firehose.
I would not recommend this book as an introductory text to those unacquainted with the Bible or biblical scholarship, but for those acquainted, it is an incredibly rewarding and informative journey.
The central thesis of this book is the notion that the biblical writers understood God corporeally, just as their contemporaries had their own bodily deities. Personally, I found her establishment of this fact fairly convincing, even though some of her interpretations of biblical passages to that effect are less so. However, her polemical bent towards Christianity is readily apparent, and at least in some places it seems to result in the assertion of things not warranted by the evidence, at least in my view (even as a non Christian).
Otherwise, the book is incredibly well written, if not a bit too meandering at times. This book took forever for me to get through because I felt as though I had to stop and take notes every few pages. It was the literary equivalent of drinking from a firehose.
I would not recommend this book as an introductory text to those unacquainted with the Bible or biblical scholarship, but for those acquainted, it is an incredibly rewarding and informative journey.
September 9, 2022
I really enjoyed the first half of this book. It was an energetic portrayal of Yahweh and his various body parts that really leaps off of the page. You can tell the author has passion for bringing light to this more ancient understanding of God in relation to humanity.
I appreciated the author's commentary on how the notion of God became more abstract as time and ideas wore on. However, it soon became clear that her passion to revive the physical nature of God hindered her ability to convey this process. A Chapter midway through the book demonstrates this. On the topic of lightness vs darkness, she concludes that this later addition from the Christian perspective led to modern day racism. Now, I am no Christian, but from here on her contempt for the faith becomes quite clear and begins to obstruct her academic dissection.
Short rebuttals to this vein through the book: not only did she omit the ancient Zoroastrian origin of the duality of good vs evil, but she states that the much later associations of light & dark / good & evil with white & black skin was solely conjured up from what she describes as a uniquely Christian abstraction. 1. As mentioned, this is not uniquely, nor originally, a Christian concept. 2. There was no mention of the theory of natural selection, which arguably is the more likely source of modern racism. 3. Neither did she mention that the origin of the anti-slavery movement came from a Christian source (the Quakers). 4. Neither that it's abolishment and later civil rights campaigns were based on Christian principles of universality and equality under God. It was by appealing to their shared Christian theology that Martin Luther King was able to persuade white Americans of his just cause.
I did not expect to be defending Christianity when reading a book about the anatomy of Yahweh. It is disappointing that the duality of the author's passion both stimulates her engagement with the topic of Yahweh as well as her disdain for the religion that emerged from it. As such both avenues become tainted and I do not trust the author to convey her passion reliably.
I appreciated the author's commentary on how the notion of God became more abstract as time and ideas wore on. However, it soon became clear that her passion to revive the physical nature of God hindered her ability to convey this process. A Chapter midway through the book demonstrates this. On the topic of lightness vs darkness, she concludes that this later addition from the Christian perspective led to modern day racism. Now, I am no Christian, but from here on her contempt for the faith becomes quite clear and begins to obstruct her academic dissection.
Short rebuttals to this vein through the book: not only did she omit the ancient Zoroastrian origin of the duality of good vs evil, but she states that the much later associations of light & dark / good & evil with white & black skin was solely conjured up from what she describes as a uniquely Christian abstraction. 1. As mentioned, this is not uniquely, nor originally, a Christian concept. 2. There was no mention of the theory of natural selection, which arguably is the more likely source of modern racism. 3. Neither did she mention that the origin of the anti-slavery movement came from a Christian source (the Quakers). 4. Neither that it's abolishment and later civil rights campaigns were based on Christian principles of universality and equality under God. It was by appealing to their shared Christian theology that Martin Luther King was able to persuade white Americans of his just cause.
I did not expect to be defending Christianity when reading a book about the anatomy of Yahweh. It is disappointing that the duality of the author's passion both stimulates her engagement with the topic of Yahweh as well as her disdain for the religion that emerged from it. As such both avenues become tainted and I do not trust the author to convey her passion reliably.
February 11, 2024
This is an incredible work of comparative religion and mythology, placing the God of the Bible in the mythological and religious context of ancient Near Eastern belief, and I deeply admire it for this reason and this context. I’d rate it a strong 4.5 for that alone. However, I am distinctly more mixed when it comes to how the author approaches metaphor and allegory, treating them as cop-outs and contemporary wishful thinking (let’s just say that God as Mother in the Christian sense is a product of Cistercian monks in the medieval period, not just of feminist theologians of the 20th century trying to make an androcentric faith fit with their political context). There’s also a sense in here that religious evolution is a cop-out, in a way, which I’m also very mixed on. I think there’s a line of reinterpretation where something ceases to be good theology, but surely if we have made God in our own image, as this book so eloquently argues, then God too must change as worshippers change, and this is not a disservice to a religion or to the literary complexity of the Bible’s many texts. Sometimes, in fact, Stavrakopoulou treads uncomfortably close to literalism in her efforts to remind the reader that God once had a body, and, being a medievalist, I am never very fond of literalism as a biblical interpretation framework, even if it’s not contemporary fundamentalist Protestantism. And at the end of it all, I’m ultimately much more interested in exegetical traditions and how people have interpreted the Bible for their own ends and to mirror their own contexts than I am in envisioning God exactly as the original authors of these texts would have. We go on making God in our image, telling our stories in the ways that reflect our own reality, and I would argue that this is not bowdlerisation inherently, but using the tool of belief for the purposes of an ever changing world.
May 8, 2022
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.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is an atheist on a mission to talk about God's body, or at least the things we know about it from the Bible, from other apocrypha and Jewish and Christian traditions, and what we know about the bodies of the other gods of south-west Asia at the time. How was Yahweh depicted and how does that fit in with his equivalents in other religions, as well as his relatives like El, Baal, Marduk, et al. Oh yeah, and why did the Bible write out his wife and non-Jesus kids?
Stavrakopoulou has written a book which has the readability of general interest history, and the research and analysis of a far more academic text. She doesn't dwell on the precise details of translation of passages (which I would be interested in but this is not the book for that) which some might find a bit blunt a manner of presenting her arguments.
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.
The story is one of a journey from an old god from a pantheon who had physical form and would appear on Earth to literally stomp out his enemies, to the incorporeal god of the New Testament. I would perhaps have liked more information on *why* Yahweh lost his body: there is some stuff in here around that, but I think there's more explore.
I also learned Yahweh likes foot stools, so we have that in common. Amen.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is an atheist on a mission to talk about God's body, or at least the things we know about it from the Bible, from other apocrypha and Jewish and Christian traditions, and what we know about the bodies of the other gods of south-west Asia at the time. How was Yahweh depicted and how does that fit in with his equivalents in other religions, as well as his relatives like El, Baal, Marduk, et al. Oh yeah, and why did the Bible write out his wife and non-Jesus kids?
Stavrakopoulou has written a book which has the readability of general interest history, and the research and analysis of a far more academic text. She doesn't dwell on the precise details of translation of passages (which I would be interested in but this is not the book for that) which some might find a bit blunt a manner of presenting her arguments.
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.
The story is one of a journey from an old god from a pantheon who had physical form and would appear on Earth to literally stomp out his enemies, to the incorporeal god of the New Testament. I would perhaps have liked more information on *why* Yahweh lost his body: there is some stuff in here around that, but I think there's more explore.
I also learned Yahweh likes foot stools, so we have that in common. Amen.
November 27, 2024
Really wonderful! Stavrakopoulou’s thesis is elegantly summarized at the very end of her book:
...the distance between God and humanity is light years from the image of God in the Bible. The Christian construct of God as a transcendent, invisible and incorporeal being is a distorted refraction, not a reflection, of the Biblical image of God. 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. This was a deity who crafted god-shaped humans from clay, and breathed life into their nostrils. But this was also a god who wept and talked and slept and sulked. A god who felt and fought and loved and lost. A god who sometimes failed and sometimes triumphed. This was a god more like the best of us and the worst of us. A god made in our own image.
December 6, 2021
Utterly fantastic
April 30, 2022
Exceptional
Well worth reading, others will do better reviews than me, I'm just posting twenty words to say I enjoyed it immensely and learned a lot
Well worth reading, others will do better reviews than me, I'm just posting twenty words to say I enjoyed it immensely and learned a lot
September 22, 2025
'If cattle or horses had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each have themselves...the Ethiopians say that their gods are broad-nosed and dark-skinned, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.'
Xenophanes of Colophon, circa 500 B.C.
Interesting book. By reference to the Old Testament (Tanakh to Jews) and Ancient Middle Eastern myths and religions, all of which came out of the same World, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou traces how an Ancient Levantine sky god, Yahweh, in origin the son of former Supreme deity El, once conceived of as part of a pagan pantheon, with, like other gods of the time, a physical, humanlike body, a wife, cult statues and animal sacrifices, developed over many centuries in human imagination into the largely disembodied, abstract, one true God of Christians and Jews today.
Had He not done so, it would have been harder for the Christian idea of the Trinity, a God who is both Three beings and One, to take hold, as it is easier to believe such abstractions of a God who transcends a physical body.
However, once God ceased to have a body, Man ceased to be, as the Bible says, made in God's image.
The authoress, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, now of Exeter University, sets this out in a lot of detail, so before buying this book it is worth viewing some of the talks and interviews she gave about it on YouTube, to check that you find what she has to say on this subject as interesting as I do. These include on the Digital Hammurabi Channel with Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis, but there are others.
Chapters of this book trace ancient ideas of God's body, starting with His feet, working all the way up through legs, arms etc. to His head (He was said to have a handsome face and hair).
There are Chapters on the Divine genitals. The only detail about Jesus's body in the New Testament is that he was circumcised.
Historically, Rabbis taught that Yahweh/ the Lord (God the Father to Christians) is circumcised. He apparently always has been, as there is no tradition of who circumcised him or what happened to the Holy Foreskin. In contrast Jesus (God the Son to Christians)' supposed circumcised foreskin was for centuries a venerated relic in Roman Catholic Christianity, until stolen in 1983 and never recovered.
In the oldest Hebrew traditions, preserved, mixed with later, different, ones, in the Old Testament, Yahweh has physical feet that stride across the landscape.
By comparison, an ancient pagan temple in Syria, sadly destroyed by bombing by the Turkish air force in fighting a few years ago, has giant footprints of some forgotten pagan god carved into its stone steps to show the deity entering the temple, but no such footprints leave it, implying the god took up permanent residence inside.
In the earlier parts of the Bible, Yahweh had a booming voice and physical breath. In Biblical Hebrew, the same word meant both breath and spirit, seen as the same thing, as both left the body on death. Near the beginning of Genesis when, in most translations, 'The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters' of the new Earth, that is God's breath.
The authoress believes that, like other Ancient gods, Yahweh once had statues worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem and elsewhere, until these were looted by the Assyrians and Babylonians when they conquered Israel and Judah.
During the Captivity in Babylon, following this defeat, the Jewish elite had to learn to practice their religion without such images. They eventually came to believe that such 'idolatrous' practices were why the Lord had punished them by letting their land fall to foreign invaders. Hence several Books of what became the Bible, written round that time, not only condemn idolatry, but play down the extent that it was ever part of the religion of their ancestors.
The authoress, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, does not believe in religion, but she is not a Richard Dawkins type militant atheist. Of Greek ancestry (although she grew up in Britain), from an early age familiar with Myths of Ancient Greek gods, who were usually imagined with humanlike bodies, desires and emotions, she wanted to know if the God of Christianity and Judaism was ever like that, and how He became so different.
This book was first published in 2021, close to the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, which in a few places shows. As normal for academics these days, Professor Stavrakopoulou is Politically Correct.
She says 'Hebrew Bible' rather than privilege Christianity by calling it the Old Testament, and 'South-West Asia' - rather than 'Colonial' terms 'Middle East' or 'Near East'. She uses BCE/CE dates - referring to a meaningless 'Common Era' rather than BC/AD. The cover of the UK paperback edition quotes admiring reviews from arch Religious Wets Rowan Williams and Karen Armstrong. However, don't let any of that put you off reading 'God An Anatomy'.
A sample of other points I learned from this book:
-King Tutankhamen of Egypt had sandals inlaid with pictures on the upper soles showing foreign enemies of Egypt, so he could literally walk on his enemies.
-In Hosea 2.14-15 and Ezekial 16.7-8 God sounds downright lecherous wanting to enjoy the body of Israel, seen as a maiden, and possesively demands fidelity from her.
-By 500 BC, Yahweh worship had become exclusive. The Bible dismisses all other gods as 'gillulim' which translators usually render 'idols' but is literally 'Faeces Gods' (Professor Stavrakopoulou uses a cruder word than 'faeces' here).
-Ezekial 28.17 has the story of a King of Tyre who lived in the Garden of Eden until God cast him out for thinking himself a god. The authoress believes this predates Genesis and is an older version of what developed into the story of Adam and Eve, evicted from Eden for eating a forbidden fruit they think will make them 'like gods'.
-Exodus 34 says Moses was in the presence of God on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights. It troubled later Rabbis that Moses might during that time have 'gone to the lavatory', if I can put it like that, in the presence of God, which to them would be blasphemous, so they came up with explanations as how Moses could go 40 days and nights without needing to answer the call of nature.
-Deuteronomy 34.6 literally says that after Moses died, God personally buried Moses' body. This bothered later Rabbis, as contact with a corpse would have made God, according to his own laws, ritually impure. Hence Rabbis and even Christian translators tend to say vaguely that Moses 'was buried', but not who buried him.
-The earliest myth of the invention of writing is Sumerian, from around 2,000 BC, when the Priest-Kings of the cities of Kullab (later called Uruk) and Anatta quarreled, through messengers, about refurbishing a temple of Inanna. They exchanged increasingly complicated arguments that their messengers had to memorise, until the arguments became too long and complex for the messengers to remember, so King Emmarkar of Kullab invented writing on clay tablets.
-In another Sumerian myth, slightly echoed in the later Greek story of Prometheus, the god Enki hoarded the gifts of writing, carpentry, metalwork, weaponry, leather work, prostitution, textile production, love making, brewing, basketweaving and decision making, which, to the Sumerians, constituted the arts of civilisation, in an underwater temple. The goddess Inanna wanted to give these gifts to the city of Uruk, and persuaded Enki, when he was drunk, to let her take them, which she stowed in her boat. Enki, once sober, changed his mind and Inanna had to battle through storms and sea monsters Enki sent to stop her, but Inanna eventually succeeded in delivering all these gifts to Uruk, and thus to humanity.
*****
In the Acknowledgements at the end of God An Anatomy, the writer thanks a list of her 'clever friends', who 'all made their mark on this book', including 'Natalie Haynes'. I assume that is the Natalie Haynes who 'Stands Up for the Classics' on BBC Radio 4, author of 'A Thousand Ships', which I also reviewed on Goodreads.
Xenophanes of Colophon, circa 500 B.C.
Interesting book. By reference to the Old Testament (Tanakh to Jews) and Ancient Middle Eastern myths and religions, all of which came out of the same World, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou traces how an Ancient Levantine sky god, Yahweh, in origin the son of former Supreme deity El, once conceived of as part of a pagan pantheon, with, like other gods of the time, a physical, humanlike body, a wife, cult statues and animal sacrifices, developed over many centuries in human imagination into the largely disembodied, abstract, one true God of Christians and Jews today.
Had He not done so, it would have been harder for the Christian idea of the Trinity, a God who is both Three beings and One, to take hold, as it is easier to believe such abstractions of a God who transcends a physical body.
However, once God ceased to have a body, Man ceased to be, as the Bible says, made in God's image.
The authoress, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, now of Exeter University, sets this out in a lot of detail, so before buying this book it is worth viewing some of the talks and interviews she gave about it on YouTube, to check that you find what she has to say on this subject as interesting as I do. These include on the Digital Hammurabi Channel with Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis, but there are others.
Chapters of this book trace ancient ideas of God's body, starting with His feet, working all the way up through legs, arms etc. to His head (He was said to have a handsome face and hair).
There are Chapters on the Divine genitals. The only detail about Jesus's body in the New Testament is that he was circumcised.
Historically, Rabbis taught that Yahweh/ the Lord (God the Father to Christians) is circumcised. He apparently always has been, as there is no tradition of who circumcised him or what happened to the Holy Foreskin. In contrast Jesus (God the Son to Christians)' supposed circumcised foreskin was for centuries a venerated relic in Roman Catholic Christianity, until stolen in 1983 and never recovered.
In the oldest Hebrew traditions, preserved, mixed with later, different, ones, in the Old Testament, Yahweh has physical feet that stride across the landscape.
By comparison, an ancient pagan temple in Syria, sadly destroyed by bombing by the Turkish air force in fighting a few years ago, has giant footprints of some forgotten pagan god carved into its stone steps to show the deity entering the temple, but no such footprints leave it, implying the god took up permanent residence inside.
In the earlier parts of the Bible, Yahweh had a booming voice and physical breath. In Biblical Hebrew, the same word meant both breath and spirit, seen as the same thing, as both left the body on death. Near the beginning of Genesis when, in most translations, 'The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters' of the new Earth, that is God's breath.
The authoress believes that, like other Ancient gods, Yahweh once had statues worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem and elsewhere, until these were looted by the Assyrians and Babylonians when they conquered Israel and Judah.
During the Captivity in Babylon, following this defeat, the Jewish elite had to learn to practice their religion without such images. They eventually came to believe that such 'idolatrous' practices were why the Lord had punished them by letting their land fall to foreign invaders. Hence several Books of what became the Bible, written round that time, not only condemn idolatry, but play down the extent that it was ever part of the religion of their ancestors.
The authoress, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, does not believe in religion, but she is not a Richard Dawkins type militant atheist. Of Greek ancestry (although she grew up in Britain), from an early age familiar with Myths of Ancient Greek gods, who were usually imagined with humanlike bodies, desires and emotions, she wanted to know if the God of Christianity and Judaism was ever like that, and how He became so different.
This book was first published in 2021, close to the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, which in a few places shows. As normal for academics these days, Professor Stavrakopoulou is Politically Correct.
She says 'Hebrew Bible' rather than privilege Christianity by calling it the Old Testament, and 'South-West Asia' - rather than 'Colonial' terms 'Middle East' or 'Near East'. She uses BCE/CE dates - referring to a meaningless 'Common Era' rather than BC/AD. The cover of the UK paperback edition quotes admiring reviews from arch Religious Wets Rowan Williams and Karen Armstrong. However, don't let any of that put you off reading 'God An Anatomy'.
A sample of other points I learned from this book:
-King Tutankhamen of Egypt had sandals inlaid with pictures on the upper soles showing foreign enemies of Egypt, so he could literally walk on his enemies.
-In Hosea 2.14-15 and Ezekial 16.7-8 God sounds downright lecherous wanting to enjoy the body of Israel, seen as a maiden, and possesively demands fidelity from her.
-By 500 BC, Yahweh worship had become exclusive. The Bible dismisses all other gods as 'gillulim' which translators usually render 'idols' but is literally 'Faeces Gods' (Professor Stavrakopoulou uses a cruder word than 'faeces' here).
-Ezekial 28.17 has the story of a King of Tyre who lived in the Garden of Eden until God cast him out for thinking himself a god. The authoress believes this predates Genesis and is an older version of what developed into the story of Adam and Eve, evicted from Eden for eating a forbidden fruit they think will make them 'like gods'.
-Exodus 34 says Moses was in the presence of God on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights. It troubled later Rabbis that Moses might during that time have 'gone to the lavatory', if I can put it like that, in the presence of God, which to them would be blasphemous, so they came up with explanations as how Moses could go 40 days and nights without needing to answer the call of nature.
-Deuteronomy 34.6 literally says that after Moses died, God personally buried Moses' body. This bothered later Rabbis, as contact with a corpse would have made God, according to his own laws, ritually impure. Hence Rabbis and even Christian translators tend to say vaguely that Moses 'was buried', but not who buried him.
-The earliest myth of the invention of writing is Sumerian, from around 2,000 BC, when the Priest-Kings of the cities of Kullab (later called Uruk) and Anatta quarreled, through messengers, about refurbishing a temple of Inanna. They exchanged increasingly complicated arguments that their messengers had to memorise, until the arguments became too long and complex for the messengers to remember, so King Emmarkar of Kullab invented writing on clay tablets.
-In another Sumerian myth, slightly echoed in the later Greek story of Prometheus, the god Enki hoarded the gifts of writing, carpentry, metalwork, weaponry, leather work, prostitution, textile production, love making, brewing, basketweaving and decision making, which, to the Sumerians, constituted the arts of civilisation, in an underwater temple. The goddess Inanna wanted to give these gifts to the city of Uruk, and persuaded Enki, when he was drunk, to let her take them, which she stowed in her boat. Enki, once sober, changed his mind and Inanna had to battle through storms and sea monsters Enki sent to stop her, but Inanna eventually succeeded in delivering all these gifts to Uruk, and thus to humanity.
*****
In the Acknowledgements at the end of God An Anatomy, the writer thanks a list of her 'clever friends', who 'all made their mark on this book', including 'Natalie Haynes'. I assume that is the Natalie Haynes who 'Stands Up for the Classics' on BBC Radio 4, author of 'A Thousand Ships', which I also reviewed on Goodreads.
May 14, 2024
Yahweh has a big nose. Moses said that. Those who knew Yahweh best decided to build a golden calf rather than wait another day for the return of Moses. Baal as lord, Asher as a God’s wife, a committee of Gods, Leviathan the sea monster, the face of God are all part of the bizarre tidbits that are in plain sight within the Bible.
Someone once told me that the only evidence that could dissuade them from believing in Jesus as God incarnate is if His bones were found. I know now the proper response to that is I will only believe in Jesus if His divine most perfect foreskin from his penis is found. In medieval times that foreskin was available, unfortunately it has been lost.
Maimonides disappears the body parts of Yahweh while the early re-writers of the holy books harmonize the various Gods in the Old Testament into one person and act as if His body parts are metaphors and analogies while a plan reading of the text tells a different story.
The OT has two religions in it and the book of Isaiah is the dividing line between the two. Read the Bible and it shouts at you. God has body parts and there are multiple Gods in the first part of the book and they even had Titans in the land of Cannan before they claimed to have committed genocide. Women wear a covering on your head as Paul warns you and the author says that is so that the women don’t tempt the spirits that lurk around them. Those Gods have body parts and will use them if women tempt them too much (always blame the victim).
Philo of Alexandria started the allegories, Maimonides makes the composite simple by making the real into metaphors and turning the plan text into an abstract substance for the Jews and Aquinas for Catholics makes God’s essence into His existence taking away all attributes that made the plan original reading of the text by ignoring context, place, and meaning.
Aquinas will even go as for as to argue that when Jesus spent three days in hell fighting the devil for the bones of Moses that was only the human part of Jesus not his divine nature. If only I had the foreskin of Jesus, then I would believe the analogies and metaphors, until then I’ll see the Bible as a collection of myths that it is with Gods who have anatomies. “God created man in his own image” means what it says.
The Bible makes sense only if you don’t give it special status and read later synchronization and harmonization on to it after the fact and you see it as the collection of myths trying to explain the world to a people in search of an identity that was constantly changing.
Someone once told me that the only evidence that could dissuade them from believing in Jesus as God incarnate is if His bones were found. I know now the proper response to that is I will only believe in Jesus if His divine most perfect foreskin from his penis is found. In medieval times that foreskin was available, unfortunately it has been lost.
Maimonides disappears the body parts of Yahweh while the early re-writers of the holy books harmonize the various Gods in the Old Testament into one person and act as if His body parts are metaphors and analogies while a plan reading of the text tells a different story.
The OT has two religions in it and the book of Isaiah is the dividing line between the two. Read the Bible and it shouts at you. God has body parts and there are multiple Gods in the first part of the book and they even had Titans in the land of Cannan before they claimed to have committed genocide. Women wear a covering on your head as Paul warns you and the author says that is so that the women don’t tempt the spirits that lurk around them. Those Gods have body parts and will use them if women tempt them too much (always blame the victim).
Philo of Alexandria started the allegories, Maimonides makes the composite simple by making the real into metaphors and turning the plan text into an abstract substance for the Jews and Aquinas for Catholics makes God’s essence into His existence taking away all attributes that made the plan original reading of the text by ignoring context, place, and meaning.
Aquinas will even go as for as to argue that when Jesus spent three days in hell fighting the devil for the bones of Moses that was only the human part of Jesus not his divine nature. If only I had the foreskin of Jesus, then I would believe the analogies and metaphors, until then I’ll see the Bible as a collection of myths that it is with Gods who have anatomies. “God created man in his own image” means what it says.
The Bible makes sense only if you don’t give it special status and read later synchronization and harmonization on to it after the fact and you see it as the collection of myths trying to explain the world to a people in search of an identity that was constantly changing.
December 20, 2024
Внимание: если вы возьметесь за эту книгу, то помимо нее прочтете пару десятков статей на википедии, загуглите сотню событий/картин/статуй, а ваш список на гугл-картах для посещения приобретет кучу новых мест, большинство из которых - увы - расположены в весьма нестабильном регионе! И все же: потрясающе!
Отдельным удовольствием было читать о религиях и богах Месопотамии/Леванта/Египта и о том, насколько они похожи друг на друга.
Даже не представляю, сколько времени авторша потратила на изучение всего этого материала: библиография внушает страх своими объемами… 😅
Отдельным удовольствием было читать о религиях и богах Месопотамии/Леванта/Египта и о том, насколько они похожи друг на друга.
Даже не представляю, сколько времени авторша потратила на изучение всего этого материала: библиография внушает страх своими объемами… 😅
February 12, 2025
Super duper cool book on the origin story of the God of the Bible that answers the age old question “What if God wasn’t a benevolent all knowing all powerful being but instead just a massive dude with monster feet and big burly balls and a tummy that hurts and gets hungry sometimes??”
In all seriousness it was very interesting to see how the God of the Bible (Yahweh) evolved out of other deities in ancient south western Asia and changed in the early centuries of his existence and then evolved into the modern God of the West that we know today.
4.5/5
In all seriousness it was very interesting to see how the God of the Bible (Yahweh) evolved out of other deities in ancient south western Asia and changed in the early centuries of his existence and then evolved into the modern God of the West that we know today.
4.5/5
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 14, 2025
‘A God made in our own image’
May 15, 2022
In the middle of listening to Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s God: An Anatomy, I saw the comedian Nish Kumar perform at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival. Talking about the racist abuse he has received as a person of colour, Kumar joked: “I’m a bad Muslim – a Hindu.” He continued to point out that Christians are much better Muslims than Hindus, believing in only one god with similar attributes, stories, and rules.
Coming back to God after watching Kumar, I found myself reflecting anew on one of Stavrakopoulou’s repeated refrains: “… and the God of the Bible was no different.” Focusing mainly on the Bronze Age context in which the tales that made their way into the Hebrew Bible were formed, before being written down in the ongoing change of the Iron Age, Stavrakopoulou shows how the God of monotheists was, once upon a time, one of a pantheon with whom he had a lot in common. This long-term development of God as a cultural force has echoes today, both in how the Christian and Jewish religions are practiced as well as in the fruitless attempts of Christians to impose their one interpretation of a multi-layered, diachronically composed text onto other worshippers of ostensibly the same God. In a modern world in which Christian exceptionalism is rife, it is an excellent reminder that Christianity is just as culturally contingent as any other religion, and that its long history has seen it adapt and change to the religious, social, and cultural forces at play at any given moment in history.
It's a religious history that could, I suspect, only have been written by an atheist. Stavrakopoulou is not shy about the fact that she was raised an atheist; she shows, I think, as much respect to her religious subjects as to her historical ones. Indeed, I would argue that she shows that it is more interesting to view God as a cultural object that functioned across many different places and times than to try and rationalise him as a real being that created the universe any everything in it. There is the sense, at times, that as someone who was never expected to believe in something up above that no one touches or can see she doesn’t get religious people, but far less than is the case with other prominent atheists. Nevertheless, this does not distract from the rigorous quality of Stavrakopoulou’s historical account.
A popular claim of atheists is that God is a Bronze Age deity; a claim that I have previously been pretty uncomfortable with for a number of reasons. First of all, the Hebrew Bible is Iron Age, having largely been written down from the eighth century BCE; secondly, the invisible God of modern Christianity, especially in his intentionally boring post-Enlightenment Protestant incarnations, is very much a cultural product of the modern world. However, in focusing on the Bronze and Iron Ages, Stavrakopoulou shows how integral the early context of God’s development was to his later existence in the Iron Age and beyond, including into Early Christianity and the modern world. Many of the conflicts and contradictions of Christianity are rooted in the on-going rationalisation of texts written in a world with profoundly different concepts of what a deity could or should be, concepts that Stavrakopoulou elucidates clearly and in great detail. Bronze Age qualities have been fossilised in the God of the Bible, and modern Christians are trapped with them in their belief in the sacred truth of that delightfully inconsistent and internally contradictory text.
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 increasingly focused on the question of Christ’s relationship to God, his resurrection, and the concept of the Trinity. The history of Christianity is a history of trying to make sense of inherited ideas and declaring Christians that disagree with you heretics or not-real Christians, and that is aptly illustrated here.
While an atheist account being reviewed here by an atheist, Stavrakopoulou does not follow the usual atheist challenges to Christian belief, which are, she argues, based more on the modern concepts of God that are derived from that post-Enlightenment, colonialist, disembodied God created to make Christianity work in a world where it is increasingly unnecessary as an explanatory structure. The Bronze Age deity is a much more human figure than we usually admit. In exploring the cultural contexts in which that god came to be, developed, and grew, Stavrakopoulou offers fascinating insights into the nature of belief and changes in religion that remain significant to this day.
Coming back to God after watching Kumar, I found myself reflecting anew on one of Stavrakopoulou’s repeated refrains: “… and the God of the Bible was no different.” Focusing mainly on the Bronze Age context in which the tales that made their way into the Hebrew Bible were formed, before being written down in the ongoing change of the Iron Age, Stavrakopoulou shows how the God of monotheists was, once upon a time, one of a pantheon with whom he had a lot in common. This long-term development of God as a cultural force has echoes today, both in how the Christian and Jewish religions are practiced as well as in the fruitless attempts of Christians to impose their one interpretation of a multi-layered, diachronically composed text onto other worshippers of ostensibly the same God. In a modern world in which Christian exceptionalism is rife, it is an excellent reminder that Christianity is just as culturally contingent as any other religion, and that its long history has seen it adapt and change to the religious, social, and cultural forces at play at any given moment in history.
It's a religious history that could, I suspect, only have been written by an atheist. Stavrakopoulou is not shy about the fact that she was raised an atheist; she shows, I think, as much respect to her religious subjects as to her historical ones. Indeed, I would argue that she shows that it is more interesting to view God as a cultural object that functioned across many different places and times than to try and rationalise him as a real being that created the universe any everything in it. There is the sense, at times, that as someone who was never expected to believe in something up above that no one touches or can see she doesn’t get religious people, but far less than is the case with other prominent atheists. Nevertheless, this does not distract from the rigorous quality of Stavrakopoulou’s historical account.
A popular claim of atheists is that God is a Bronze Age deity; a claim that I have previously been pretty uncomfortable with for a number of reasons. First of all, the Hebrew Bible is Iron Age, having largely been written down from the eighth century BCE; secondly, the invisible God of modern Christianity, especially in his intentionally boring post-Enlightenment Protestant incarnations, is very much a cultural product of the modern world. However, in focusing on the Bronze and Iron Ages, Stavrakopoulou shows how integral the early context of God’s development was to his later existence in the Iron Age and beyond, including into Early Christianity and the modern world. Many of the conflicts and contradictions of Christianity are rooted in the on-going rationalisation of texts written in a world with profoundly different concepts of what a deity could or should be, concepts that Stavrakopoulou elucidates clearly and in great detail. Bronze Age qualities have been fossilised in the God of the Bible, and modern Christians are trapped with them in their belief in the sacred truth of that delightfully inconsistent and internally contradictory text.
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 increasingly focused on the question of Christ’s relationship to God, his resurrection, and the concept of the Trinity. The history of Christianity is a history of trying to make sense of inherited ideas and declaring Christians that disagree with you heretics or not-real Christians, and that is aptly illustrated here.
While an atheist account being reviewed here by an atheist, Stavrakopoulou does not follow the usual atheist challenges to Christian belief, which are, she argues, based more on the modern concepts of God that are derived from that post-Enlightenment, colonialist, disembodied God created to make Christianity work in a world where it is increasingly unnecessary as an explanatory structure. The Bronze Age deity is a much more human figure than we usually admit. In exploring the cultural contexts in which that god came to be, developed, and grew, Stavrakopoulou offers fascinating insights into the nature of belief and changes in religion that remain significant to this day.
February 17, 2025
Hrvatsko izdanje: Anatomija boga. Prevela Sandra Mlađenović. Oceanmore, Zagreb, 2024.
Britanska teologinja i bibličarka F. Stavrakapolou sučeljuje judrokršćanske predodžbe o bogu s rezultatima historiografskih, arheoloških i antropoloških spoznaja. Pred nama se postupno pomalja ljudsko-božanska slika i prilika od glave do pete, od sjaja u oku do nožnih prstiju. Tu su imaginacije boga kao ratnika, strasnog ljubavnika, tvorca svjetova, osvetnika, mudrog starca. Na temelju glinenih pločica, starih spisa, svitaka i zapisa rekonstruira se "anatomija boga": glava, torzo, ekstremiteti, genitalije, čak i utroba. Dvadeset poglavlja ovog štiva nevjerojatne, raskošne erudicije obuhvaća razdoblje od kipića iz drevne Mezopotamije preko biblijskog boga do novozavjetnih tekstova. Od Ela do Isusa!
Impresivna knjiga.
Britanska teologinja i bibličarka F. Stavrakapolou sučeljuje judrokršćanske predodžbe o bogu s rezultatima historiografskih, arheoloških i antropoloških spoznaja. Pred nama se postupno pomalja ljudsko-božanska slika i prilika od glave do pete, od sjaja u oku do nožnih prstiju. Tu su imaginacije boga kao ratnika, strasnog ljubavnika, tvorca svjetova, osvetnika, mudrog starca. Na temelju glinenih pločica, starih spisa, svitaka i zapisa rekonstruira se "anatomija boga": glava, torzo, ekstremiteti, genitalije, čak i utroba. Dvadeset poglavlja ovog štiva nevjerojatne, raskošne erudicije obuhvaća razdoblje od kipića iz drevne Mezopotamije preko biblijskog boga do novozavjetnih tekstova. Od Ela do Isusa!
Impresivna knjiga.
April 27, 2023
God : An Anatomy by Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou is an examination of the archeological and historical origins of the deity who eventually came to be worshiped by 3 major world faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It mostly covers the history of Yahweh, the God of Israel and Judah, and then of Christianity around the world.
Three thousand years ago, in the Levant area 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 each gods in their own right. One of them, a minor storm deity known as Yahweh. He had a body, a wife, offspring, pets, colleagues, and this is a story of how he evolved to become a monotheistic deity who, in time would be merged with his larger, and much better historically documented father El, for whom Israel was named.
The book goes into Canaanite recorded history of the early pantheon, then into the Proto Hebrew stories of the early Torah regarding "The God of the People of Israel". How this God had a body, all the same parts we have now since we were to have been "created in his image" and the early stories that described the anatomy of their deity and the importance of each body part.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter in Great Britain and is an expert in the history of all the deities and faiths of the Levant region. And for anyone who is interested in a more rounded and complete history of one of the most important beings to millions of worshipers around the world, this book is a good start.
A solid 5 out of 5 read!
Three thousand years ago, in the Levant area 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 each gods in their own right. One of them, a minor storm deity known as Yahweh. He had a body, a wife, offspring, pets, colleagues, and this is a story of how he evolved to become a monotheistic deity who, in time would be merged with his larger, and much better historically documented father El, for whom Israel was named.
The book goes into Canaanite recorded history of the early pantheon, then into the Proto Hebrew stories of the early Torah regarding "The God of the People of Israel". How this God had a body, all the same parts we have now since we were to have been "created in his image" and the early stories that described the anatomy of their deity and the importance of each body part.
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter in Great Britain and is an expert in the history of all the deities and faiths of the Levant region. And for anyone who is interested in a more rounded and complete history of one of the most important beings to millions of worshipers around the world, this book is a good start.
A solid 5 out of 5 read!
November 30, 2022
Despite a fascinating topic well-argued... I found this slightly hard work and was relieved when I finished it. The book’s core thesis—that the god of Judaism and Christianity was for many centuries understood to be a divine but physical being, with a body, bodily functions, passions, and relationships with other gods—is very quickly explained and totally convincing, which means that the next several hundred pages don’t quite have the urgency that persuasion, or unfolding of an argument’s layers might have brought. Every individual passage is very well written, there is a staggering amount of history and myth packed neatly into every chapter, it is often funny and surprising, but perhaps because it is arranged by topic/body part rather than chronologically, with no narrative to order it, as a whole it feels a bit bloated and fragmented. We jumped between places, eras and pantheons so frequently that I don’t think I could actually recount any of the history or mythology I read about to another person. I admit that a more conscientious reader might not experience these issues.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 269 reviews