Neusner posits that the rabbinic God achieves a full “personality” in the Babylonian Talmud when He is portrayed as freely engaging with and even arguing with human beings. In these moments, God and humanity have the “same rules of discourse” and God is “held accountable to human standards.” Neusner calls this the “social attributes” of…

The recurrence of the fluidity model in Judaism of the first millennium c.e. is even more pronounced in the mysticism of that period. We saw in Chapter 2 that some biblical passages display a notion of an “angel” or malakh who is a part of God but does not encompass all of God. These angels…

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Even though Judaism is passed down from the mother today, this is a concept that emerged very late and is not found in the Bible. Moreover, it is not found in the Apocryphal works written during the Second Temple period, the Dead Sea Manuscripts, the writings of Philo and Josephus, the New Testament, and Paul’s…

In a text dating to about the 1st century AD, Jacob is referred to as “the angel of God” and “the firstborn of all living things”: Similarly, in the New Testament, Jesus Christ is called “the firstborn of all creation” [Colossians 1:15]. | Prayer of Joseph

Moses bin Maimonides’ (d. 1204) fear that the Jews would be disgraced by the gentiles due to the prevalence of the anthropomorphic image of God among the Jews: “If the gentiles heard about these people, they would say, ‘Surely this nation is a stupid and ignorant people’” [Commentary on Sanhedrin 10] And somewhere in the…

More about the lack of “Monotheism” as we understand it in ancient times: “In Greco-Roman antiquity, all gods existed, even for the ancient ‘monotheists’.” “The heavens were too crowded even for ‘monotheists’” The purpose of the inscriptions mentioning the word “single god” in ancient times is not to give the number of gods of the…

The rabbis accuse God of not obeying His commands: “O Ruler of the Universe! You have written in your Torah: ‘You shall not take revenge or hold a grudge’ (Lev. 19:18) but you do this yourself: ‘[God] is vengeful and full of wrath.’ (Nah. 1:2)” [Genesis Rabbah 55:3] This event is related to the concept…

“The god of Israel has never been the only god, not even in his own book. The Jewish scriptures are full of other deities. In situations of war, they struggle with Yahweh. But they also converse with him. They participate in his heavenly court. They bow before him. And another point that is not emphasized…

The Proof of God’s Existence and al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa One of al-Ghazālī’s earliest works, which he wrote when he was still teaching Ashʿarī kalām at the Niẓāmiyya college in Baghdad before his first crisis in 488/1095, is the Tahāfut al-falāsifa. Al-Ghazālī intended this work—as its title indicates and as he states in its introduction—as a…