A man named Nabu-nadin-shumi woke up that morning in Babylon with a mix of exhilaration and exhaustion, and mused on the chain of tragic and fortuitous events that had led him there. Long ago, when Samuel was judge in Israel but Adad-apla-iddina was king in Babylon, the wicked Arameans and Sutians had plundered their way through the land, “overthrew all the temples,” and, when they'd come to Sippar, “the ancient city, abode of the great judge of the gods,” they profaned the great temple E-babbar.1 They'd stolen the sun god Shamash from his 'shining house,' and so “his appearance and his attributes had vanished beyond grasp” – his cult statue was lost.2
The years passed, and while Saul was king of Israel, Simbar-shipak rose to be king in Babylon. Determined to appease the gods, Simbar-shipak had yearned to restore Shamash to his temple, but what could he do? No way appeared to “discover his image and his attributes;” no new statue could be made. So Simbar-shipak enshrined a sun-disk, an abstract symbol of Shamash, in E-babbar; and he tasked the priest Ekur-shuma-usharshi to resume the regular offerings.3 Everyone knew, though, this was only “a special expedient for an emergency situation.”4
That was a century and a half ago. Now had come a year that you or I might know as 856 BC, the days of Elijah, with Jehoshaphat on the throne of David in Jerusalem, and Ahab and Jezebel raging from their palace in Samaria. But to Nabu-nadin-shumi, none of those names meant anything. An heir of Ekur-shuma-usharshi, Nabu-nadin-shumi was shangu priest at the E-babbar in these days when Nabu-apla-iddina was king in Babylon. And now a baked clay relief bearing the lost image and attributes of Shamash had come to light, dug up from across the river, a seeming miracle out of the earth.5
The priest had gone to show it to the king, and the king had been overjoyed, tasking Nabu-nadin-shumi with assembling craftsmen to make a new cult statue using this image.6 And so the craftsmen labored hard, finding just the right kind of tree, carving everything out of wood, plating it with fine gold and precious jewels like lapis lazuli to reflect the heavenly glory of Shamash.7 Nabu-nadin-shumi had been in charge of the whole process. And now, in the sacred Ekarzagina garden on the bank of the Euphrates in Babylon, the rituals were underway.8
Yesterday, the favorable day, he'd spread out red and white cloths, led the statue to the river bank, positioned it facing west, hurled a ram's thigh into the river, put the statue in an orchard, mixed holy water and poured it into a tamarisk trough, made offerings to all the gods they could think of, and recited all sorts of incantations. It was a heavy day of opening and purifying the statue's mouth.9
Now, this morning, having set out food and drink, burned incense, recited more incantations, he whispered into the statue's left ear, “From this day, let your fate be counted as divinity; among your brother gods may you be counted.”10 He assembled the craftsmen who made the statue, bound their hands, and ritually mimed cutting them off while they swore oaths that the statue was built by the gods, not by their own mortal hands.11
After a ritual to open the statue's eyes, proclaiming it a “statue born in heaven,” he led it in procession north from Babylon to Sippar, to the doors of E-babbar.12 “In the temple, may your heart's joy continue daily!” he chanted as, with sacrifice, he admitted Shamash to his own innermost shrine.13 With final offerings, washing the statue's mouth for the final time, by night it was time to dress and crown the image with all “the trappings of divinity.” It was done – “let the evil tongue stand aside” – for the sun god was back in E-babbar!14
Alright, at this point in our story, you might be asking, “Pastor, what on earth does any of this Babylonian claptrap have to do with the Bible, much less with Genesis?” Okay, fair question! But thanks for bearing with me. We've been exploring, for these past few months, the grand saga of creation. And at the end of August, we saw that Genesis chapter 1 is encoded with seven upon seven upon seven to communicate to us that the entire universe God creates is a temple, the biggest temple in the world because it is the world; and the seventh day is a declaration that God has come to indwell this temple, rest in this temple, reign from this temple. But then we moved to chapter 2, a new story that lends a different perspective on the works of the Creator. Here, we get an earthier angle on those works, and we find that there's a land the author calls 'Eden' where God plants a special garden. Two weeks ago, we established that if the world was a temple, this garden was its holy of holies.
Now, suppose Nabu-nadin-shumi showed up here right now, stumbling through those church doors. After he hears what we've learned so far, there's one natural question he's going to have. To him and most people in his world, the most natural expectation is that a temple houses an image. The whole point of a temple, to them, is to offer the god service through the idol and to thereby contact the god through the idol.15 As one Old Testament scholar puts it, “no pagan temple in the ancient Near East could be complete without the installation of the cult image of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated.”16 So, Nabu-nadin-shumi will ask us, if this garden is the sanctuary, where's the idol, the statue?
And what we should tell him, when he asks, is to hold onto his hat, because he's in for a surprise – starting with these verses we read this morning. Now, remember the sequence of events from before. First, Nabu-nadin-shumi assembles his craftsmen to make a new statue out of a wooden core enclosed within gold and jewels. The physical material has to be given shape in the workshop. Well, what happens in Genesis? Somewhere on earth, as if in God's workshop, “the LORD God formed the human from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7) – physical material being given the right shape. In Babylon, what did Nabu-nadin-shumi do next? An elaborate series of rituals in a garden, all meant to open the mouth of the statue. What does God do next? He takes this shapely dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). And in doing so, God opens the human's mouth, bringing him ritually to birth. Nabu-nadin-shumi thinks that the result of his rituals is that the statue comes to life, becoming a god. And in Genesis, we're told that after God does the work of craftsman and priest, “the human became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7).17 From here on out, the human is everything Nabu-nadin-shumi imagined his statue of Shamash would become, and it's now widely agreed by Old Testament scholars that the Genesis depiction of human origins intentionally mimics those types of rituals.18
And the word for the clay relief Nabu-nadin-shumi showed to the king, and then for the big statue he designed on its basis, was – in Akkadian – tsalam. Hebrew has a similar word – tselem – which could be likewise refer to “cultic statuary,”19 any “physical object intended as a sign of foreign gods” from Israel's point-of-view.20 But God announces: “Let us make man in our tselem, after our likeness. … So God created man in his own tselem; in the tselem of God he created him” (Genesis 1:26-27). The tselem, the image, that God makes is the human being – it's me, it's you!
And in the same way that Nabu-nadin-shumi then walked the supposedly enlivened statue to E-babbara, where he ritually installed it in the innermost shrine, so, after the human being is brought to life, we read that “the LORD God took the human and installed him in the Garden of Eden” (Genesis 2:15). The verb here is exactly the same verb the Bible uses for how idolaters would 'install' cult statues in their high places or shrines (Isaiah 46:7; 2 Kings 17:29).21 What they do with their idols, God does with us in the garden. We're the true idol!
Now, to Babylonians like Nabu-nadin-shumi, an idol wasn't just a reminder of the god it represented; it actually, so they thought, manifested that god on earth, by being brought to life as an extension and expression of the god in his essence, so it was “a physical, living manifestation of an otherwise invisible reality,” present as “the main conduit of divine self-disclosure.”22 An idol was considered as an item of revelation and action, believed to be indwelt by the god's spirit so that the god could receive service through it and give blessing for the city and territory around the temple.23 To them, once all the rituals were done, it was imagined as no longer just a statue but somehow the god himself, made really present in that place.24
But the witness of Scripture shows why idolatry is silly. “Claiming to be wise,” Paul comments, “they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:22-23). But “in Israel, there were to be no carved images because God had already made a concrete image both visible and tangible to all who would look.”25 Idols are pointless because God already made and installed the only 'idol' that works! So the prophets mocked behavior like Nabu-nadin-shumi's, because although he played pretend that his idol was carved by his gods, the prophets kept hammering home the inconvenient truth that this was mere make-believe, that “the idols of the nations are... the work of human hands” (Psalm 135:15), “all of them the work of craftsmen” who are regular joes with human frailties (Hosea 13:2; Isaiah 44:12). Where Nabu-nadin-shumi waxed poetic about the special purity of his materials, the prophets waxed polemic about how under all that fancy dressing is nothing but “wood that will rot” (Isaiah 40:20). And where Nabu-nadin-shumi was convinced his incantations could turn wood into deity, the prophets insisted his rituals were powerless to give life. Such idols “have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths” (Psalm 135:16-17). The result is a doll of dependence, a passive object of human deeds, unable to act on the world (Jeremiah 10:5).
After the prophets, the point was made that somebody like Nabu-nadin-shumi is a person “living on borrowed breath..., and what he makes with lawless hands is dead. For he is better than the things he worships: at least he lives, but never his idols” (Wisdom 15:16-17). And when Paul makes his way to Athens, he explains patiently that the real God, the Creator God, is too infinite to be confined to an artificial temple. No matter how big or grand, it's merely a gesture, and a potentially misleading one. Nor is this God in a position of dependence on our services, since he's the provider of all we have in the first place, “life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25). Paul continues that thought by quoting even a Greek poet's confession that human beings as God's offspring. And if that's so, Paul asks, then how could anything subhuman – something as lifeless as mineral or wood – ever fittingly represent our Father (Acts 17:28-29)? God is pure action, so how can he be imaged by an idol that's purely passive? If God's the Way, how can he be imaged by something that can't move itself? If God is Truth, how can he be imaged by something fake to its core, a thing that by its very nature is “a teacher of lies” (Habakkuk 2:18)? If God is Life, how can he be imaged truly by something breathless, dormant, dead?
It's no wonder the prophets call such things “abominable images” (Ezekiel 17:19), “worthless things” (Psalm 31:60, for they steal a job that they can't possibly perform. But we are “the living representation pointing to a living and real God... unlike the lifeless images of other deities made by human hands.”26 No wonder, too, then, that one early Roman Christian responded to a pagan friend trying to lure him back to idolatry by asking: “What image would I fashion for God, seeing that man can be rightly considered as himself the image of God?”27 But, as Paul told us, “you know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols,” away from our true human calling (1 Corinthians 12:2).
Worse still, “those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Psalm 135:18). Because we really are far better than the works of our hands (whether that means a physical cult statue or a cherished technology or a cultural or societal phenomenon we cause, like a government or an economy or an ideology – we're better than them all), the only way to magnify our manufactured works as our gods is to shrink ourselves down low, subhumanly low, until we can at last look up to them – that is, the only way to carry out idolatry is to become spiritually deformed, recast into the likeness of something ill-suited to the image we're made to bear.
This wrongful likeness poisons us, blinds and deafens our hearts, by making us more like the blind and deaf and dead things we put our foolish trust in.28 To trust what we can manufacture is to conform our lives to something so much less alive than the God who is Life, so much less true than the God who is Truth, so much less good and beautiful than the God who is Goodness and Beauty. “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love” (Jonah 2:8), rejecting the incredible privilege and responsibility that comes from being a living representative of the living God. “Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry” (1 Corinthians 10:14)! Only a living human being can image God; nothing less is up to the job. It takes idols with a pulse.
And it's not just that we're alive, but even though we're in one sense animals, we're made to reflect God in a way no other creature on earth can. “The image of his own nature he made us” (Wisdom 2:23). We have an inner self, a spiritual soul, that's “invisible, incorporeal, incorruptible, and immortal,” analogously to how God lives.29 We're thinkers with reason and intelligence, reflective of God.30 We're inventive, for “in imitation of his Creator, man also creates houses, walls, cities, harbors, ships, dockyards, chariots, and countless other things.”31 We're intrinsically relational like God, with a “capacity for interpersonal communion” no other earthly creature has.32 We bear God's image in our natural virtue, for “that soul is well painted in which resides... the reflection of its paternal nature.”33 Across the infinite gulf between creature and Creator, God made you so profoundly that, where every other animal was made “according to its kind,” you weren't; you were made “after the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:25-26). Family resemblance to a heavenly Father defines the human 'kind.'
Idols are fake, yes. But you, with your living family resemblance to a heavenly Father, are the real deal. You and I exist on earth, are installed in the garden, “to represent and mediate the divine presence on earth.”34 You were put here with the intent that you would be indwelt by the true God's Spirit. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). That's what we were all made for! Each person is supposed to have God's Spirit in us, is supposed to be a walking, talking manifestation of God's real presence. You are created to be a conduit of God's self-disclosure. You're more than a reminder; you're a revelation! You are created to be a body through whom God himself receives service through the actions of others, and you are created to be a point from which God's blessing radiates out to the world around, as his glory is made visible through you. That's what it means to be made in the image of God!
One old Christian poet dared to say that this made the human being “a fitting image, a beloved icon..., a god of flesh.”35 Modern scholars looking at this say we're given a “status of near divinity,”36 “endowed with the power of God's presence” and due “reverence from the rest of creation.”37 And if that's so, what are we due from each other? How should we treat each other and ourselves, if we're “gods of flesh,” the image of God on earth?
Human life, human health, human dignity then are holy things, not to be violated. To mistreat a human being isn't just violence; it's sacrilege! How much sacrilege there is, then, in the world's senseless wars, in our gun-cluttered streets and our so-called 'clinics' of dismemberment, in our abuse-rife penal system, in our exploitative entertainments, in the gaping jaws of our medical mammons and our mass-media behemoths and our legal leviathans, in all our vast structures of oppression! How much blasphemy in our words spoken with contempt, reducing a splendid image of the Lord God Almighty to a mere label for a hue of pigmentation, an economic stratum, a developmental benchmark, a social group, a legal standing, an action, a temptation!
And not only these active offenses of sacrilege and blasphemy should pierce our hearts with sorrow, but consider: how does a god take it when his image is neglected? Nabu-nadin-shumi could tell you that avoiding service to a cult statue “was akin to high treason; it jeopardized peace, prosperity, and life.”38 So, do we neglect our neighbor, next door or around the globe? Do we treat each other with indifference instead of reverence? Can we gaze at the image of God and be bored, or avert our gaze and reduce the image of God to a statistical aberration? That passive cruelty, even (or especially) to the least and the last – is it not akin to high treason, withholding from the Most High God what his image on earth is owed?
To see humans as images of God, as holy idols with a pulse, is to become zealous servants of those around us, realizing that a measure of our service to God is to be found in how we treat them – including how we treat ourselves. Such a vision calls for a radical respect for their and our dignity as God's image, glorifying God for how he discloses himself through their and our humanity. So what if we treated each other with the sacred regard and reverent attention God's living image is naturally due? What if we lived out of that vision? What might come of such a life of loving God through his image?
Alas, the powers of this world that hold themselves forth as if gods – thereby jeopardizing peace, prosperity, and life on earth – do their best to blind people's minds “to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the Image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Above us all, it's the Eternal Son who most perfectly reflects the Eternal Father, being “the radiance of his glory and the exact stamp of his essence” (Hebrews 1:2), who can say, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me” (John 14:10). In Christ the Image, we see God utterly accessible and irrepressibly active. It is Jesus who, in human flesh, defines what it means to be truly and fully human; he images God in a way not even Adam and Eve could, for in the sight of God (who sees without restriction of time), “the first Adam is the imitation of the Second.”39 What it means to be human, what it means to be God's image, is defined by Christ, the Eternal Word, our template before time began. And though we became dilapidated and damaged images stripped of glory, our likeness to God effaced, in Christ we find a new humanity “which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:10). Thanks be to God! Amen.
1 Simbar-šipak, inscription B.3.1.1, lines 10-13, in Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Babylon 2:73 (“during the reign of Adad-apla-iddina, king of Babylon, hostile Arameans and Sutians, enemies of Ekur and Nippur, who desecrated Duranki, upset in Sippar – the ancient city and abode of the great judge of the gods – their cultic rites, plundered the land of Sumer and Akkad, and overthrew all the temples”); compare this to a Babylonian chronicle translated in Writings from the Ancient World 19:285 (“the Arameans and an usurper rebelled against Adad-apla-iddina..., profaned the holy cities, as many as there were in the country; they destroyed Dēr, Nippur, Sippar, and... the Suteans took the offensive and carried the booty of Sumer and Akkad into their country”).
2 BM 91000, lines i.1-12, in Christopher E. Woods, “The Sun-God Tablet of Nabû-apla-iddina Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 56 (2004): 83. On É-babbar as the 'Shining House' of Sippar, see Andrew R. George, House Most High: The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia (Eisenbrauns, 1993), 70.
3 BM 91000, lines i.13-23, in Christopher E. Woods, “The Sun-God Tablet of Nabû-apla-iddina Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 56 (2004): 83 (“Because he [Simbar-šipak] could not discover his image and his attributes, he enshrined the sun disk, which is (now) before Šamaš, established regular offerings (for it), and entrusted (them) to Ekur-šuma-ušarši, the šangu priest of Sippar, the diviner”).
4 Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context (Almqvist & Wiksell, 1995), 48.
5 BM 91000, lines iii.19-25, in Christopher E. Woods, “The Sun-God Tablet of Nabû-apla-iddina Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 56 (2004): 85 (“a relief of his image, a fired clay (impression) of his appearance and attributes, was found across the Euphrates, on the western bank”).
6 BM 91000, lines iii.26-iv.20, in Christopher E. Woods, “The Sun-God Tablet of Nabû-apla-iddina Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 56 (2004): 85 (“Nabû-nādin-šumi... showed that relief of the image to Nabû-apla-iddina, the king, his lord; and when Nabû-apla-iddina, the king of Babylon..., beheld that image, his countenance brightened, his spirit rejoiced. To the fashioning of that image, his attention was directed...”).
7 Gregory K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (IVP Academic, 2008), 130.
8 BM 91000, lines iv.19-28, in Christopher E. Woods, “The Sun-God Tablet of Nabû-apla-iddina Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 56 (2004): 85-86 (“With reddish gold and lustrous lapis-lazuli, he properly prepared the image of Šamaš, the great lord. By the purification rite of Ea and Asarluḫi, before Šamaš, in the Ekarzagina, which is on the bank of the Euphrates, he washed its mouth, and there it took up its residence...”).
9 BM 45749, lines 1-36, in Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), 77-79.
10 BM 45749, lines 37-49, and Incantation Tablet 3, Section C, lines 6-10, in Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), 80, 152-153.
11 BM 45749, lines 49-52, in Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), 80 (“You position all of the craftsmen who approached that god, and their equipment..., before Ninkurra, Ninagal, Kusibanda, Ninildu, and Ninzadim; and you bind their hands with a scarf and cut them off with a knife of tamarisk wood.... You make them say: 'I did not make him; Ninagal who is Ea, god of the smith, made him'”).
12 BM 45749, lines 53-59, in Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), 80-81.
13 Incantation Tablet 4, Section B, line 35, in Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), 187.
14 BM 45749, lines 60-65, and Incantation Tablet 5, Section C, line 18, in Christopher Walker and Michael Dick, The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001), 81-82, 206.
15 Michael B. Handley, Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 69.
16 J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Baker Academic, 2005), 87.
17 Gregory K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (IVP Academic, 2008), 132.
18 See especially Catherine L. McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5-3:24 in Light of the mīs pî, pīt pî, and wpt-r Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Eisenbrauns, 2015).
19 Stephen L. Herring, Divine Substitution: Humanity as the Manifestation of Deity in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 114.
20 Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (IVP Academic, 2015), 75.
21 Catherine L. McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5-3:24 in Light of the mīs pî, pīt pî, and wpt-r Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Eisenbrauns, 2015), 150.
22 Stephen L. Herring, Divine Substitution: Humanity as the Manifestation of Deity in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 121; Catherine L. McDowell, The Image of God in the Garden of Eden: The Creation of Humankind in Genesis 2:5-3:24 in Light of the mīs pî, pīt pî, and wpt-r Rituals of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt (Eisenbrauns, 2015), 85; Michael B. Dick, “The Mesopotamian Cult Statue: A Sacramental Encounter with Divinity,” in Neal H. Walls, ed., Cult Image and Divine Representation in the Ancient Near East (American School of Oriental Research, 2005), 43.
23 Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Teaches and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 78.
24 Michael B. Dick, “The Mesopotamian Cult Statue: A Sacramental Encounter with Divinity,” in Neal H. Walls, ed., Cult Image and Divine Representation in the Ancient Near East (American School of Oriental Research, 2005), 51.
25 Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (IVP Academic, 2015), 82.
26 Mark S. Smith, The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (Fortress Press, 2009), 101.
27 Minucius Felix, Octavius 32.1, in Ancient Christian Writers 39:111.
28 Gregory K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (IVP Academic, 2008), 45-46.
29 Origen of Alexandria, Homilies on Genesis 1.13, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 71:63.
30 Augustine of Hippo, On Genesis Against the Manichees 1.17 §28, in Works of Saint Augustine I/13:57; Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q.3, a.1, ad 2, in Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae 2:23.
31 Theodoret of Cyrus, Questions on Genesis 20.2, in Library of Early Christianity 1:53.
32 Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator (Baker Academic, 2017), 145.
33 Ambrose of Milan, Hexaemeron 6.7 §§41-42, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 42:254-255.
34 J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Baker Academic, 2005), 87.
35 Jacob of Serugh, Memra 71.2151-2154, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 59:46.
36 William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford University Press, 2010), 42.
37 Andrei A. Orlov, Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism (Routledge, 2022), 29.
38 Michael B. Hundley, Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 77.
39 Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ 6.12, in Carmino J. deCatanzaro, tr., Nicholas Cabasilas: The Life in Christ (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1998), 190.
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