Former Fellow Collin Cornell publishes edited volume

The origins of this project trace back to a class I took at Princeton Seminary—an informal, extracurricular seminar, actually. We were translating through a number of inscriptions from the next-door neighbors of ancient Israel, and we came to a rather long one from a kingdom on the other side of the Dead Sea, a place called Moab. This inscription tells of a god (named Chemosh) who had been angry at his land and so allowed his people to be conquered by Israel. But then Chemosh grew favorable and led his client king to victory, driving out the foreign invader. In other words, it reads like a photo negative of a chapter from the Hebrew Bible: all the same elements, just inverted. I had been brought up as a Christian to expect that the biblical God alone is God, unique. “Who then is like me?” God asks in Isaiah (44:7). The answer, I had thought, is NOBODY. But there was Chemosh, looking very similar indeed. As I wrote in my own chapter contribution to the book, this experience occasioned some theological vertigo for me, “an uneasy sense of going off balance; of theological coordinates gone blurry."

 

My training in Hebrew Bible at Emory was second to none—and I thank the Tam Institute for supporting my studies with a Graduate Fellowship. But much of my work only deepened a historical awareness of the similarities between the biblical God and other ancient deities; it did not address the theological dimension, of what to make, as a religiously committed person, of these divine doppelgängers. So the matter lay dormant. But eventually the thought came to me that I am hardly the first to consider Yhwh’s ancient look-alikes, and in fact many of the most respected scholars in the field are also practicing Jews and Christians. So why not consult them to see how they have navigated this theological challenge? With the help of the Judaic Book Fund Grant from the Tam Institute and a Competitive Research Award from the Laney Graduate School, I began to do just that. I reached out to authors and put together a book proposal in the spring of 2017.

I hope that this book can be a resource for integration. People encounter the reality that the biblical God had ancient look-alikes in a number of ways: study notes in Bibles, religion classes in college, seminary and divinity school, adult education forums. And many of those people confess, sometimes on a regular basis, that Yhwh is one; or that “There is but one only living and true God” (that’s the Westminster Confession). But there’s not much guidance or discussion out there as to how to think these things together. This book offers an opportunity to hear from some of the best living scholars of the Hebrew Bible about how they approach the subject. I anticipate that it will challenge some readers to think more critically and historically, and from others it will demand that they flex some unfamiliar theological muscles. As far as I am aware, there’s nothing quite like this book out there.