FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
From Standing Stones to Sacred Emptiness: Textual and Visual Portrayals of Israel’s God
Registrants now receive a discount code for 30% off of Ted’s book from Oxford University Press!
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar in our monthly series on August 29, at 7:30 pm EDT, featuring Prof. Theodore Lewis. Portrayals of divinity are incredibly complex as they are culturally, sociologically, politically, and theologically contingent. Asking the simple question about how ancient Israelites and Judahites portrayed God (i.e. El and Yahweh) turns into a historical puzzle, interacting with a wide variety of ancient writers and artisans on how they conceptualized divinity. Did they imagine Israelite El as an enthroned, benevolent patriarch, a majestic bull, or even a solid block of stone? What about Yahweh and the Hebrew Bible’s aniconic tradition that the Almighty is not to be portrayed in concrete form?
This webinar will sift through both visual (archaeological) and textual narratives as they have diverse functions and/or audiences and reflect different kinds of literacies. We’ll look at artisans’ considerable diversity, from standing stone installations to anthropomorphic figurines to bull images. Even within the Hebrew Bible’s aniconic tradition we see diversity—from the ethereal quality of fire to solar metaphors to abstract notions of Yahweh taking up residence via his sacred “Name” or manifesting through “radiance” (kābôd yhwh) that conjures Neo-Assyrian melammu imagery. Strikingly, we’ll also investigate the use of sacred emptiness to portray divinity. How is it that less is more? Wide ranging questions will be explored and invited. Are there archaeological correlates for such abstract expressions? How do we imagine the pragmatic focal points for ritual performance? Join us for this exploration of some of the expressions of divine presence in the lives of ancient Israelites and Judahites. Prof. Lewis will conclude his webinar with a live Q&A session. For more information on this topic, please check out the speaker’s recent article in The Ancient Near East Today on “The (Historical) Origin of God.”
Theodore J. Lewis holds the Blum-Iwry Professorship in Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is a Semitist, a Hebrew Bible scholar, and a historian of religion whose research has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lewis received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as an ITT Fellow. Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins he taught at Harvard University and the University of Georgia.
Lewis is the author of The Origin and Character of God: The Religion of Ancient Israel through the Lens of Divinity (Oxford University Press), which received the 2020 Frank Moore Cross Award from ASOR for “the most substantial volume related to the history and/or religion of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.” He is also the author of Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (Harvard Semitic Monographs) and co-author of Ugaritic Narrative Poetry. He is General Editor of the Writings from the Ancient World series (SBL Press).
ASOR Sustaining Members: $0 | ASOR Members: $5 | Public: $10
To receive your ASOR member discount, log into the online store. If you are new to ASOR, please click on the “New Visitor Registration” link to register your e-mail address and choose password for our online store. Once logged in, navigate to “Meeting and Event Registration” to register for the webinar and pay the fee. Each paid registrant will receive a confirmation e-mail when you pay for the webinar. If you do not receive this e-mail, then you are not registered. Please e-mail membership@asor.org with any questions or issues with registering.
You will be e-mailed the Zoom Webinar link in the week prior to the lecture on August 29, 2021. If you do not receive the link by the close of business on the Thursday before the webinar, please e-mail membership@asor.org immediately. All webinars are recorded and all paid registrants will be sent a link to view the recording.
All proceeds from this lecture are used to fund scholarships for members impacted by COVID-19 as well as increasing ASOR’s online resources, which are free to the public.
