Abstract
The Old Testament projects not only a Deity that created the world and human beings but also one that is violent and male. The debate on the depiction of the God of Israel that is violent and male is far from being exhausted in Old Testament studies. Thus, the main question posed in this article is: If re-read as ‘Humans created God in their image’, would Genesis 1:27 account for the portrayal of a Deity that is male and violent? Feuerbach’s idea of anthropomorphic projectionism and Guthrie’s view of religion as anthropomorphism come to mind here. This article therefore examines, firstly, human conceptualisation of a divine being within the framework of the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism. Because many a theologian and philosopher would deny that God is a being at all, we further investigate whether the God of Israel was a theological and social construction during the history of ancient Israel. In the end, we conclude, based on the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism, that the idea that the God of Israel was a theological and social construct accounts for the depiction of a Deity that is male and violent in the Old Testament.
Highlights
In an interesting volume, Wrestling with the Violence of God: Soundings in the Old Testament, Wilgus and Carroll (2015) address a pertinent issue of the problematic image of God in the Old Testament
Everything that is around them and whatever cannot be accounted for through logical reasoning and empirical evidence must surely be just like them. If they have no cognitive access to certain things, human beings would rather imagine those things to be exactly like them. Is it possible that humans imagined the character and person of the Deity of ancient Israel – YHWH? To address the main question posed by this article, we follow this outline:
A cardinal question to pose is: if the creation narrative was a construct of the Priestly authors, what can we make of the narrative about the creator? Asked differently: is it likely that the image of the creator in Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament was created by the scribes, especially in the light of the view that the creation story was written by human beings? Inevitably, the authors and final redactors constructed a particular theology that undergirded their narrative and biblical myths in order to propound a certain ideology
Summary
The authors examine the explicit portrayals of divine violence as well as human responses to the violence of God, violence in the world of the Old Testament and alternative understandings of supposedly violent texts. We pose a cardinal question: based on the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism, how does the idea that YHWH was a theological and social construct account for the depiction of a Deity that is male and violent in the Old Testament?
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