The Hebrew here is qnyty [I have gotten/gained/got me/procreated] ‘yš [man] ‘t [with] yhwh [Lord/Yahweh]. My modern translation has verse 15 as “His legs are alabaster pillars,” after verse 14 talks of the lover’s arms.

This is a standard summary of the mainstream Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) understanding of divine transcendence, but one that, as Francesca Stavrakopoulou, professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter, insists, is a very long way from the language of much of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. His feet were always firmly rooted in His sacred places; whether on a platform of lapis lazuli, as on His holy mountain (Ex. Back when she was at university, Francesca Stavrakopoulou made a shocking discovery: she had been duped. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.She suggests instead this should be based on whether it responds to the needs of individuals, even if this means we act differently towards others in the same situation. The God we worship is a glorified Being in whom all power and perfection dwell, and he has created man in his own image and likeness (Gen. Throughout the book I tried to put myself in their position – to imagine how it would feel to not know who might be on the throne this time next year, or what sort of religious settlement might be in place. Last year’s Wolfson History Prize was awarded to Sudhir Hazareesingh’s Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, an in-depth exploration of the leader the Haitian Revolution.

Besides the Genesis 2-3 creation myth, Stavrakopoulou cites the story of Jeshurun from Deuteronomy, as well as passages from Job and Jeremiah. 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. Thanks to second-millennium BCE texts from the Syrian city-state Ugarit, we know that Yahweh was once a minor storm god of a wild, mountainous region south of the Negev desert. What are the dimensions, the vital signs and especially the implications for those who organized their lives around Him? The older, white-haired god with whom we are more familiar is the creation of the prophet Daniel, writing in the second century BCE.However, are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. She argues that womanism, with its focus on wholeness, can be used to criticise not only Black theology but also feminism during this time. Between the girl’s celebration of her boy’s golden hands and his marble thighs, we read (New Jerusalem Bible): “His belly a block of ivory / covered with sapphires,” and other versions are similar. 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.

In 2020, statues from around the world, from the United States to New Zealand, were pulled down and broken up by protesters. He examines the misery of the isolation endured by pioneers far from home, trapped in an alien and frightening environment. She draws repeatedly not just on her close reading of the Hebrew but also on her wide and resourceful use of relevant and surprisingly copious lexical and archaeological work done just since the turn of the millennium. Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination. Her programme requires of her, also, a closing chronological thrust toward the Jewish and Christian successors of the Israelites who imagined Yahweh in the first place.

So, all in all, speaking as a semi-academic — master’s degree, knowledge of Biblical languages, etc.

The second is that Yahweh, the god of the Bible, started life as a fairly minor storm god in a larger pantheon of gods. As Stavrakopoulou notes, at some point in the history of what became Israel, Hebrew mythology identified the high god, El, with his more active deputy. 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. This Yahweh is the god whom Francesca Stavrakopoulou – professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the university of Exeter – anatomises. Distinguished speakers investigate those things in which we believe deeply – and for which we would be prepared to make a costly stand.

Stavrakopoulou has taken to heart the biblical injunction to seek the face of God, and what emerges is a deity more terrifyingly alive, more damaged, more compelling, more complex than we have encountered before. It belongs in a mindset for which the divine is a hugely magnified version of physical human dominance – male (and sexually predatory), aggressive, imagined in terms of conventional masculine glamour. In Syria, his name is Ba’al, “the master” – the deity who, in the Bible, is regularly cast as the archetypal false god who lures the people of Israel into apostasy. Before the turn of the first millennium BC, the Israelites and Judahites likely venerated El as the head of their pantheon.