Winner of the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the best new idea in religion.A Human-Shaped God approaches the humanlike accounts of God in the Old Testament as the starting places for theology and uses them to build a picture of the divine. This understanding of God is then brought into conversation with traditional conceptions that depict God as a being who knows everything that happens, is at every place at the same time, is constant and unchanging...

The nature of the Genesis narrative has sparked much debate among Christians. This book introduces three predominant interpretive genres and their implications for biblical understanding.Each contributor identifies their position on the genre or genres of Genesis, chapters 1-11, addresses why their interpretation is respectful of and appropriate to the text, and contributes examples of its application to a variety of passages.The positions include:...

Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia presents fresh and engaging translations of works that were composed or edited by female scribes and elite women of the ancient Near East. These texts provide insight into the social status, struggles, and achievements of women during the earliest periods of recorded human history (c.2300–540 BCE). In three introductory chapters and a concluding chapter, Charles Halton and Saana Svärd provide an overview of the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia and ...

A Human-Shaped God approaches the humanlike accounts of God in the Old Testament as the starting places for theology and uses them to build a picture of the divine. This understanding of God is then brought into conversation with traditional conceptions that depict God as a being who knows everything that happens, is at every place at the same time, is constant and unchanging, and does not ultimately have material form. But instead of pitting the Old Testament's humanlike view of ...

Sumerian Mythologyby Samuel Noah KramerThe Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them.Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civi...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The author of the runaway bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization takes us on another "captivating...persuasive as well as entertaining" journey into history (The New York Times), recreating a time when the actions of a small band of people had repercussions that are still felt today.The Gifts of the Jews reveals the critical change that made western civilization possible. Within the matrix of ancient religions a...

The revelatory, unputdownable true story of how a British Museum expert decoded the Old Testament's Story of the Flood.'One of the most important human documents ever discovered . . . his conclusions will send ripples into the world of creationism and among ark hunters.' - Guardian'The charged thrill of Finkel's chase permeates the book - the pages don't just join dots, they supply new pieces for a beautiful, Bronze-Age jigsaw-puzz...

Legends of Babylonia and Egyptby Leonard W. KingLegends of Babylon and Egypt was first published in 1918 under the authorship of Leonard W. King. In these lectures an attempt is made, not so much to restate familiar facts, as to accommodate them to new and supplementary evidence which has been published in America since the outbreak of the war. But even without the excuse of recent discovery, no apology would be needed for any comparison or contrast of Hebrew tradition with ...

Here, archaeologically documented,is the story of the religion of the Goddess. Under her, women’s roles were far more prominent than in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures. Stone describes this ancient system and, with its disintegration, the decline in women’s status.

Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE.That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god...

The ancient Near East is known as the "cradle of civilization"--and for good reason. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia were home to an extraordinarily rich and successful culture. Indeed, it was a time and place of earth-shaking changes for humankind: the beginnings of writing and law, kingship and bureaucracy, diplomacy and state-sponsored warfare, mathematics and literature. This Very Short Introduction offers a fascinating account of this momentous time in human history. The thr...

Adam and Eve were Pharaoh Akhenaton and Nefertiti.The Bible says that a river flowed through the Garden of Eden and then split into four branches. There is only one river in the Near East that does exactly this, and that is the long oasis-garden of the Nile valley and its division into the (originally) four branches of the Nile Delta. This observation takes Ralph into the depths of the Genesis account, and it would seem that Adam and Eve were actually Akhenaton and Nefertit...