While most of its contemporary religions have faded away, Israelite religion continues to have a major influence in the world. First delivered in 1975 as a Jordan Lecture in Comparative Religion, this volume argues that in its beginnings Israelite religion had much in common with ancient Mesopotamian religion and suggests that its endurance is due to its dynamic development of the concepts it shared with other religions.

Secrecy and the Gods is a comparative mythological study of the human reception and treatment of divine secret knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia and biblical Israel. The human royal council was the social model for ancient ideas about divine knowledge being secret - just as human kings had secrets so too did the gods. Diviners who received this knowledge from the gods in an on-going, ad hoc manner were an essential link between the divine assembly and the human royal council for whom such knowledge was intended. Scribes eventually adapted the ad hoc divinatory means of receiving divine communications to their culturally significant texts. By discursively asserting a historical connection between themselves and unique mediators with a close divine affiliation (the apkallus and Moses), the scribes constructed myths that legitimated their texts as divine revelation and claimed these were received in history through normal scribal channels. In this manner, scribes fixed the secret of the gods permanently among humans in textualized form that valorized their own position within society. Although the origin of divine secret knowledge was rooted in a common mythological idea of the divine assembly, its treatment was quite distinct. The Mesopotamians guarded divine secret knowledge through various scribal means, including the attachment of a Geheimwissen colophon to certain tablets (treated exhaustively), whereas biblical Israel published it openly. The contrast in treatment of divine secret knowledge was directly related to different mytho-political self-understandings: Mesopotamia's imperial aspirations versus biblical Israel's vassaldom. As vassals to Yahweh, the divine imperial king, the kings of Judah and Israel as presented in the biblical material were not to formulate secret orders; they were only to obey them.

The last fifty years have seen a dramatic increase of interest in the wisdom literature of the Bible, as scholars have come to appreciate the subtlety and originality of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes as well as of Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. Interest has likewise grown in the wisdom literatures of the neighboring cultures of Canaan, Egypt, and especially Mesopotamia. To help readers understand the place of biblical wisdom within this broader context, including its originality and distinctiveness, this volume offers a collection of essays by Assyriologists and biblicists on the social, intellectual, and literary setting of Mesopotamian wisdom; on specific wisdom texts; and on key themes common to both Mesopotamian and biblical culture. --From publisher's description.

Sommer utilizes a recovered ancient perception of divinity as having more than one body, fluid and unbounded selves.

The late W.G. Lambert (1926-2011) was one of the foremost Assyriologists of the latter part of the twentieth century. His principle legacy is a large number of superb critical editions of Babylonian literary compositions. Many of the texts he edited were on religious and mythological subjects. He will always be remembered as the editor of the Babylonian Job (Ludlul bel nemeqi, also known as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer), the Babylonian Flood Story (Atra-hasis) and the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma elish). The present book is a collection of twenty-three essays Lambert published between the years 1958 and 2004. These endure not only as the legacy of one of the greatest authorities on ancient Mesopotamian religion and mythology, but also because each makes statements of considerable validity and importance. As such, many are milestones in the fields of Mesopotamian religion and mythology.

Sommer utilizes a lost ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity according to which a god has more than one body and fluid, unbounded selves. Though the dominant strains of biblical religion rejected it, a monotheistic version of this theological intuition is found in some biblical texts. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers inherited this ancient way of thinking; ideas such as the sefirot in Kabbalah and the trinity in Christianity represent a late version of this theology. This book forces us to rethink the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, as this notion of divine fluidity is found in both polytheistic cultures (Babylonia, Assyria, Canaan) and monotheistic ones (biblical religion, Jewish mysticism, Christianity), whereas it is absent in some polytheistic cultures (classical Greece). The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel has important repercussions not only for biblical scholarship and comparative religion but for Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Divine Substitution is an investigation of ancient conceptualizations of divine presence. Specifically, this thesis investigates the possibility that the ancient Mesopotamian conceptualization of cultic and royal statues, thought to actually manifest the presence of gods and kings, can likewise be found in ancient Israel. Despite the overly pessimistic view of the later biblical authors, material objects were almost certainly believed to extend and manifest the presence of God in pre-exilic Israel (e.g., standing stones). Likewise, the later polemics against such cultic concepts demonstrate Israel's familiarity with this type of conceptualization. These polemics engaged in the rhetoric of mutilation and destruction of cultic representations, the erasure and re-inscription of divine names, and the rhetorical deconstruction of the specific Mesopotamian rituals thought to transform the dead statue into a living god. Though the biblical reflection of these concepts is more often found in the negative commentary regarding "foreign" cultic practices, S. Herring demonstrates that these opinions were not universally held. At least three biblical texts (Gen 1:26f.; Ex 34:29-34; and Ezek 36-37) portray the conceptualization that material images could manifest the divine presence in positive terms. Yet, these positive attestations were limited to a certain type of material image – humans.

Explains the links between the Bible and ancient Sumerian texts, probing the age-old question of the relationship between humanity and its creators. • Challenges scientific maxims of the basis of human life. • Draws fascinating parallels between the leaders of the Anunnaki (from the 12th planet) and Yahweh. • A comprehensive new look at the history of man. • First time available in hardcover. In Divine Encounters Zecharia Sitchin draws on basic Judeo-Christian texts to analyze the creation myths, paralleling Biblical stories to the myths of Sumer and Mesopotamia in order to show that humanity did not evolve without assistance. Sitchin daringly hypothesizes instead that Enki, one of the leaders of the Anunnaki from the 12th planet, created humanity as a "primitive worker." Furthermore, Sitchin suggests that the extraterrestrial encounters of today demonstrate the continued interest of the Anunnaki in the Earthlings they created.

While biblical prophets ridiculed the notion of humans fashioning an idol that they would then worship, ancient Near Eastern theologians developed a sophisticated religious system in which divine beings could be physically manifest within the material of a cultic image without being limited by that embodiment. The four essays in this compact volume examine the intriguing subject of cultic images and divine iconography in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia and Syria-Palestine. This interesting and eclectic group of essays explores the textual and artifactual evidence for the creation and veneration of divine images in the ancient Near East. The recent resurgence of scholarly interest in the study of divine representation in ancient Israel and the Near East makes this comprehensive reexamination especially timely.