The Invention of God

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. First Edition. Large octavo with brown and black half-cloth boards in grey and beige pictorial jacket; ix, 303 pages: illustrations, maps; 25 cm Near fine in near fine jacket, now in archival mylar. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780674504974, 0674504976

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 of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe--the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah--that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism. A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world's leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered. --Publisher. // Contents: The God of Israel and His name. The geographic origin of Yhwh. Moses and the Midianites. How did Yhwh become the God of Israel?. The entrance of Yhwh into Jerusalem. The cult of Yhwh in Israel. The cult of Yhwh in Judah. The statue of Yhwh in Judah. Yhwh and his Asherah. The fall of Samaria and the rise of Judah. The reform of Josiah. From one God to the only God.Translation from the French of: Invention de Dieu.