https://www.academia.edu/10024601/Sacred_Realm_The_Emergence_of_the_Synagogue_in_the_Ancient_World_1996_Entire_manuscript_ From these modest beginnings synagogues, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. , developed as the single most important institution in Jewish life, a position they have held ever since. As the institution grew, its importance was expressed through an ever­increasing attribution o f sanctity. Th e earliest evidence for this appears…

Material images of God were once a normative feature of Israelite and Judahite religion – otherwise there would be no need for the ban. As the temple is the ‘house’ of god, the deity lives in it in much the same way as human beings live in their houses. Several consequences follow from this theology…

Article The headgear of the statue has a decoration in high relief, the interpretation of which suggests a possible identiication of the god represented by the statue as Baʿal, the Levantine storm god (For the epithet Baʿal (“Lord”) used for Haddu in the Levant during the Late Bronze Age, and particularly in the Ugaritic texts,…

Yahweh appears as just one among El’s many divine children (Psalm 82): One biblical text that presents Yahweh in an explicit divine council scene does not cast him as its head (who is left decidedly mute or undescribed, probably the reason why it survived the later collapsing of the different tiers). This text is Psalm…

Article 1 Samuel 4.7. On the probability that a cult statue of Yahweh is assumed in this story, see Thomas Römer:

According to Gen 9:6, anyone who kills another should himself be killed by a human agent (See Exod 21:22–25; Lev 24:17–22; Deut 19:16–21). The reason given for this is that humans were made in God’s image (kî bəṣelem ʾĕlōhîm ʾāśāh ʾeṯ hāʾāḏām). What is it about the nature of humankind as God’s image that requires…

Article Anthropomorphic Features of God in Genesis 1:1–2:4a Apart from the verb לברוא’ to create’ every verb with God as the subject in this passage is a common verb used to describe human behavior. Scholars who stress the importance of P’s use of לברוא as a sign of its depiction of God as transcendent rarely…

The conclusion that the Genesis 1 creation account “stands toward the end of a long chain of tradition whose beginnings lie outside Israel altogether” is well established. Many scholars recognize that Genesis 1 is related to Enuma Elish (See, e.g., A. Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963); Speiser, Genesis, 8-13; B. E.…

The rhetoric against the idols in the Bible is not an example of the Jews’ vision of a transcendent god wholly independent of the pagan culture around them. These rhetorics establish a “theopolitical” discourse in the context of Mesopotamian icon/idol politics: In fact, this idol polemic literature that emerged during the exile period is trying…

It is necessary to be aware that such expressions that seem “monotheist” to us are not “monotheist” in essence. These expressions are mostly expressions formed in competition between the cults of different gods. What we have here is “megateism”, not monotheism. My god is not the only one, but he is the “biggest (mega)”. In…