Download or read book Anthropomorphic Representations of Deity in the Psalms written by Don Sherril McLemore and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book God s Body written by Andreas Wagner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images of the body in ancient Near Eastern civilizations are radically different from body images today, which in turn creates significant consequences for our understanding of the biblical notion of God's human shape and the frequent and widespread misconceptions therein. Andreas Wagner illuminates such frequent and widespread misconceptions, and reveals the sometimes distant pictorial world of ancient body images. He contrasts these with contemporary models and makes the matter of the Old Testament concept of God's human form accessible and clear. Wagner begins by introducing readers to aspects of anthropomorphism, the study of body parts, and Israel's basic understanding of the human body. He then turns specifically to the body of God, analysing why and how certain body parts are emphasized or regularly employed in the biblical text when it tries to describe God. Wagner draws out the theological aspects of the ways in which God's body is described as well as considering the diverse range of ancient Near Eastern perspectives on God, and the ways in which ancient cultures constructed and understood deities. Wagner concludes by looking at how the depiction of God in the Old Testament fits with the concept of mankind made in God's image. Enhanced by over fifty illustrations, God's Body will lead the debate in biblical anthropomorphism for years to come.
Download or read book In the Eyes of God written by Brian C Howell and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Bible, divine interaction with humanity is portrayed in almost embarrassingly human terms. God sees, hears, thinks, feels, runs, rides chariots, laughs, wields weapons, gives birth, and even repents. Many of these descriptions, taken at face value, seem to run afoul of classical thought about God's qualities of divine simplicity, transcendence, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and, especially, immutability. Traditionally, such representations have been seen as accommodations to human intellectual and moral limitations. They allowed God to be more comprehensible but did not actually describe any real part of His character, being, or interaction with humanity. References to God seeing or hearing, for example, are not deemed to represent real acts, as God is all-knowing. This view is largely based on the Aristotelian conception of metaphors: they are rhetorical devices and should not be taken literally. Since the 1970s, our understanding of the ways in which metaphors convey meaning has become much more sophisticated. We are better able to unlock the function of human acts of God within the Bible. This book aims to explore the biblical metaphor of divine sight in Genesis and how current conceptions of metaphorical function can enrich our reading of the text and its theology.
Download or read book Where the Gods Are written by Mark S. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of how to represent God is a concern both ancient and contemporary. In this wide-ranging and authoritative study, renowned biblical scholar Mark Smith investigates the symbols, meanings, and narratives in the Hebrew Bible, Ugaritic texts, and ancient iconography, which attempt to describe deities in relation to humans. Smith uses a novel approach to show how the Bible depicts God in human and animal forms—and sometimes both together. Mediating between the ancients’ theories and the work of modern thinkers, Smith’s boldly original work uncovers the foundational understandings of deities and space.
Download or read book Forming God written by Anne K. Knafl and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines divine anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible, a study characterized by disagreement and contradiction. Discussions of anthropomorphism in the Hebrew Bible are typically found in three areas of inquiry: ancient Israelite religion, as reflected by the compositions of the Pentateuch; comparisons with ancient Near Eastern religions; and comparison with ancient translation and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Contradictory arguments exist, both within each area of study and between them, about the intent of biblical writers, with respect to a theology of anthropomorphism. In this work, Knafl asserts that biblical studies has reached this impasse, largely due to its approach to the study of the phenomenon. The prevailing method has been to study divine anthropomorphism within an assumed framework of polemic and by associating it with a theological system. By contrast, Knafl analyzes divine anthropomorphism as a literary-contextual phenomenon and seeks to build a typology, from which secondary arguments regarding theology or history of religion may be built. This typology will provide scholars of biblical studies, history of religion, and (systematic) theology with a means of evaluating divine anthropomorphisms and their relation to human-divine interactions, as a biblical phenomenon.
Download or read book The Triumph of the Symbol written by Tallay Ornan and published by Saint-Paul. This book was released on 2005 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the history of Mesopotamian imagery form the mid-second to mid-first millennium BCE. It demonstrates that in spite of rich textual evidence, which grants the Mesopotamian gods and goddesses an anthropmorphic form, there was a clear abstention in various media from visualizing the gods in such a form. True, divine human-shaped cultic images existed in Mesopotamian temples. But as a rule, non-anthropomorphic visual agents such as inanimate objects, animals or fantastic hybrids replaced these figures when they were portrayed outside of their sacred enclosures. This tendency reached its peak in first-millennium Babylonia and Assyria. The removal of the Mesopotamian human-shaped deity from pictorial renderings resembles the Biblical agenda not only in its avoidance of displaying a divine image but also in the implied dual perception of the divine: according to the Bible and the Assyro-Babylonian concept the divine was conceived as having a human form; yet in both cases anthropomorphism was also concealed or rejected, though to a different degree. In the present book, this dual approach toward the divine image is considered as a reflection of two associated rather than contradictory religious worldviews. The plausible consolidation of the relevant Biblical accounts just before the Babylonian Exile, or more probably within the Exile - in both cases during a period of strong Assyrian and Babylonian hegemony - points to a direct correspondence between comparable religious phenomena. It is suggested that far from their homeland and in the absence of a temple for their god, the Judahite deportees adopted and intensified the Mesopotamian avoidance of anthropomorphic picorial portrayals of deities. While the Babylonian representations remained confined to temples, the exiles would have turned a cultic reality - i.e., the nonwritten Babylonian custom - into a written, articulated law that explicity forbade the pictorial representation of God.
Download or read book Forming God written by Anne Katherine Knafl and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on author's dissertation (doctoral - University of Chicago, 2011).
Download or read book Books in Brief Anthropomorphic Depictions of God written by Zulfiqar Ali Shah and published by International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monumental study examines issues of anthropomorphism in the three Abrahamic Faiths, as viewed through the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an. Throughout history Christianity and Judaism have tried to make sense of God. While juxtaposing the Islamic position against this, the author addresses the Judeo-Christian worldview and how each has chosen to framework its encounter with God, to what extent this has been the result of actual scripture and to what extent the product of theological debate, or church decrees of later centuries and absorption of Hellenistic philosophy. Shah also examines Islam’s heavily anti-anthropomorphic stance and Islamic theological discourse on Tawhid as well as the Ninety-Nine Names of God and what these have meant in relation to Muslim understanding of God and His attributes. Describing how these became the touchstone of Muslim discourse with Judaism and Christianity he critiques theological statements and perspectives that came to dilute if not counter strict monotheism. As secularism debates whether God is dead, the issue of anthropomorphism has become of immense importance. The quest for God, especially in this day and age, is partly one of intellectual longing. To Shah, anthropomorphic concepts and corporeal depictions of the Divine are perhaps among the leading factors of modern atheism. As such he ultimately draws the conclusion that the postmodern longing for God will not be quenched by pre-modern anthropomorphic and corporeal concepts of the Divine which have simply brought God down to this cosmos, with a precise historical function and a specified location, reducing the intellectual and spiritual force of what God is and represents, causing the soul to detract from a sense of the sacred and thereby belief in Him.
Download or read book Conflict and Enmity in the Asaph Psalms written by David Cameron Ray and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book God and the Idols written by Trent A. Rogers and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2016-11-14 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1 Cor 8-10, Paul provides instruction about interactions with idols, and his practical instruction is based on his theology, which was adopted from Hellenistic Judaism and adapted radically in the light of Jesus Christ. Trent A. Rogers shows that understanding Paul's ethical reasoning is helped significantly by understanding how he and his predecessors represent God in their arguments. - back of book.
Download or read book Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible written by Karel van der Toorn and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 1006 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD) is the single major reference work on the gods, angels, demons, spirits, and semidivine heroes whose names occur in the biblical books. Book jacket.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible written by Samuel E. Balentine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.
Download or read book When God Stands Up written by Earll Cooley Sheridan and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bodies Embodiment and Theology of the Hebrew Bible written by S. Tamar Kamionkowski and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-05-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognizing that human experience is very much influenced by inhabiting bodies, the past decade has seen a surge in studies about representation of bodies in religious experience and human imaginations regarding the Divine. The understanding of embodiment as central to human experience has made a big impact within religious studies particularly in contemporary Christian theology, feminist, cultural and ideological criticism and anthropological approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Within the sub-field of theology of the Hebrew Bible, the conversation is still dominated by assumptions that the God of the Hebrew Bible does not have a body and that embodiment of the divine is a new concept introduced outside of the Hebrew Bible. To a great extent, the insights regarding how body discourse can communicate information have not yet been incorporated into theological studies.
Download or read book Hebrew Psalms and the Utrecht Psalter written by Pamela Berger and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a major departure from previous scholarship, this volume argues that the illustrations in the famous and widely influential Utrecht Psalter manuscript were inspired by a late antique Hebrew version of Psalms, rather than a Latin, Christian version of the text. Produced during the early ninth century in a workshop near Reims, France, the Utrecht Psalter is illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings in a lively style reminiscent of Hellenistic art. The motifs are largely literal renditions of words and phrases found in the book of Psalms. However, more than three dozen motifs cannot be explained by either the Latin text that accompanies the imagery or the commentaries of the church fathers. Through a close reading of the Hebrew Psalms, Pamela Berger demonstrates that these motifs can be explained only by the Hebrew text, the Jewish commentary, or Jewish art. Drawing comparisons between the “Hellenistic” style of the Psalter images and the style of late antique Galilean mosaics and using evidence from recent archaeological discoveries, Berger argues that the model for those Psalter illustrations dependent on the Hebrew text was produced in the Galilee. Pioneering and highly persuasive, this book resolves outstanding issues surrounding the origins of one of the most extensively studied illuminated manuscripts. It will be mandatory reading for many historians of medieval art and literature and for those interested in the Hebrew text of the book of Psalms.
Download or read book A God Who Comes Near written by Rhoda A. Carpenter and published by Elm Hill. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is written to reawaken awareness of both the beauty of the psalms and their ability to speak with relevance to our contemporary culture--a generation in danger of losing the psalmist’s voice. It is written for those who may have felt marginalized by church or society, whether from loss, tragedy, illness, or misuse of power. May this generation hear the voice of the psalmist pointing them to a God who desires honest expression, who comes close to listen to their cries, and points them to a deeper understanding of who he is and how he loves. May the words of the psalmist lead them out of isolation and into authentic community. The author’s approach to the psalms begins with recognition of the intertwining of imagery with the literary structure of the poetry found in the psalms. The imagery in the psalms comes from an earthy connection of the psalmist with the land of scripture. Understanding the imagery allows the reader to “see” the psalms and receive the message. It deepens the relevance of the psalms to speak into the myriad contexts in our present day multi-cultural world. Recognition of the religious and social dynamics of ancient Israelite life--such as kingship, Zion as a place of God’s presence, and the covenant relationship of a people with their God--provide further clues to understanding the message of the psalms. Along with the rich imagery present in the psalms, this book explores the literary structure of the poetry in the psalms. Recognition of key characteristics of Hebrew poetry allows the words to “sing.” In every psalm a vivid echo of ancient voices resounds, building century upon century of expression, reaching into the present. If one reads carefully, the melodies and message can be heard. The music of the psalms breathe with life and relevance. Psalms are filled with movement to hope and praise. Yet, they address the reality that life at times hurts. The psalmist gives honest voice to pain and affirms God’s presence in the darkest moments of life. This book explores the importance of lament both individually and in community as a vehicle to healing and a deeper understanding of God’s care. The book closes with an examination of five select psalms that are representative of different types of psalms found in the psalter. They were chosen because of personal relevance. Through imagery, structure, and voice the psalms convey movement from honest expression to hope. Hope leads to thanksgiving. Praise resounds because of who God is and how he cares.
Download or read book The Baker Illustrated Bible Dictionary written by Tremper III Longman and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 2972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the pages of the Bible, we come to know God through Jesus Christ. Thus the importance of the Bible for our spiritual formation cannot be overstated. If we are honest, though, the Bible is not always easy to understand. For example, the places named in the Bible can seem strange, and the number of people mentioned is virtually countless. This comprehensive dictionary intends to help people read the Bible with increased understanding and confidence. It contains articles on major topics as well as places and people, even if they just appear in a single verse in the Bible. Its articles cover theological topics, biblical words, biblical imagery, and historical topics. This A to Z dictionary includes more than •1,700 full-color pages •400 color illustrations, maps, and photos •5,000 articles by leading evangelical scholars The Baker Illustrated Bible Dictionary is an informative, colorful, and easy-to-understand resource that will be an indispensable reference for your own personal study or in preparation for teaching.
