An unexpected portrait of God, as seen by his first believers: with a male body, superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a propensity for the fantastic and the monstrous.
Theology and religious studies teach us that the God of the Bible had no body: in the Old Testament, He was manifested only in the enigmatic words of His prophets, and in the New Testament, in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as bodily and male is typically regarded as merely metaphorical, symbolic, or poetic. However, in this revelatory study, the result of extensive research into biblical sources, the distinguished Greek-British theologian Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a thoroughly corporeal image of the biblical God: a deity with a human form, drawn from ancient myths and rituals, created by a specific society at a specific time, in the image of the people who birthed it.
Three thousand years ago in Southwest Asia, this people worshipped a complex pantheon, led by a father-god named El, who had seventy children. One of them, Yahweh, was a minor storm deity, who walked and spoke, cried and laughed, ate, slept, felt, and breathed – and was undeniably male. However, he was destined to become something much greater and more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions.
By examining the body of this God, from head to hands, feet, and genitals, exploring the places and practices, the conditions and experiences of the world before the Bible in which He began to take shape, the author traces not only the sources of the earliest monotheistic religion but also the roots of Western civilization.
