In Review
God: An Anatomy
When Time Is Short
Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene
The Power of Equivocation
Complex Readers and Readings of the Hebrew Bible
Let My People Live
An Africana Reading of Exodus
Denmark Vesey’s Bible
The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial
Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them
By Susan Ackerman
Prophetic Disability
Divine Sovereignty and Human Bodies in the Hebrew Bible
The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Ecology
By Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Alfred A. Knopf
For centuries, readers of the Hebrew Bible understood its unabashed descriptions of God’s corporeality to be strictly metaphorical. Recently, however, biblical scholars have asserted that the God of scripture does indeed have a body. In this erudite and compulsively readable book, Francesca Stavrakopoulou explores each aspect of God’s anatomy, from his head to his feet and everything in between. Stavrakopoulou gives us a vivid sense of God’s decidedly male—and even sexy—body, illuminated against the backdrop of the ancient West Asian world. How did we go from a virile young deity who emanates red-hot light to an abstract enigma confined to the heavens? In addition to helping us see the most ancient contours of God’s body more clearly, Stavrakopoulou tracks some of the key cultural moments in the life of God that led to his disembodiment in both Christian and Jewish traditions.
