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God
- An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4
- Narrated by: Francesca Stavrakopoulou
- Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Winner of The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022
Shortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize 2022
One of The Times Books of the Year 2022
Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex pantheon of deities, led by a father god called El. El had 70 children, who were gods in their own right. One of them was a minor storm deity, known as Yahweh. Yahweh had a body, a wife, offspring and colleagues. He fought monsters and mortals. He gorged on food and wine, wrote books and took walks and naps. But he would become something far larger and far more abstract: the God of the great monotheistic religions.
But as Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou reveals, God’s cultural DNA stretches back centuries before the Bible was written, and persists in the tics and twitches of our own society, whether we are believers or not. The Bible has shaped our ideas about God and religion, but also our cultural preferences about human existence and experience; our concept of life and death; our attitude to sex and gender; our habits of eating and drinking; our understanding of history. Examining God’s body, from his head to his hands, feet and genitals, she shows how the Western idea of God developed. She explores the places and artefacts that shaped our view of this singular God and the ancient religions and societies of the biblical world. And in doing so, she analyses not only the origins of our oldest monotheistic religions but also the origins of Western culture.
Beautifully written, passionately argued and frequently controversial, God: An Anatomy is cultural history on a grand scale.
Critic Reviews
"Rivetingly fresh and stunning." (Sunday Times)
"A tour de force, a triumph." (Catholic Herald)
"One of the most remarkable historians and communicators working today." (Dan Snow)
What listeners say about God
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-03-2022
worth a listen. Erudite and approachable
Really worth a listen. Erudite and approachable. great construct of different parts of god
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- Jeckylberry
- 02-01-2023
Enlightening page turner
I loved this book. Beautifully written and read. It’s not dry, it’s personable and fascinating. A real page turner. It situates the god of the Bible in his appropriate time and place. He isn’t who or what most people think he is. Once he was not all alone and not an amorphous spirit.
The writer doesn’t diminish him, He and others come alive in her well crafted narrative. If you know the Bible at all you will have read about his feet, hands, face and voice. What if that was not meant to be allegory? What if he had a body and it was magnificent?
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- D Lewis
- 21-06-2023
An excellent book
Helps answer the question of how did a minor storm and war god become creator of the universe but also how did we as humans see him. Well read by the author the audiobook is worth considering l.
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- Bethany
- 06-06-2022
Excellent and beautifully read
Absolutely loved this amazing book all about the bodily descriptions of the god of the bible and how people writing about him at different times 'saw' him. Very much contextualises the descriptions in the bible with how other gods in the region were described and worshiped at multiple time points. It does an excellent job of showing how the biblical god was continually described with the same language and given the same or similar powerful, godly characteristics. And how later authors glossed over the embodiment of their god out of reverance or because of changes in how his characteristics were seen (eg godly horns). The author does a brilliant job of reading her work. I could hardly put it down.
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- Danni
- 12-11-2021
Long but insightful
The story is quite full of differing views to the origins of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian “God.” It provides a great developmental background in how the modern version “God” came into being. Quite a lot of what the author is stating makes sense, and can be quite plausible. Unfortunately, this story is very long, and very hard to follow, and bounces quite abruptly behind timelines, and various stories. This story is full of sex, war, and human greed, lust and jealously.
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