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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.
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