Theodore Lewis's new book is a true magnum opus. It takes on the challenge of understanding ancient Israelite religion by focusing on how the Israelites conceptualized deity, more specifically, the god Yahweh and Yahweh's older relative, the Canaanite El. Lewis spares no effort to be comprehensive, taking in all the primary evidence from written texts and non-written archaeology and all the modern scholarship.... His coverage is lucid and systematic, and not simply descriptive, but a probing inquiry on many levels... paying close attention to both visual and written sources and their interplay, and demonstrating an acute awareness of the limits of our primary evidence.
Theodore J. Lewis (PhD Harvard University) is the Blum-Iwry Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Origin and Character of God: The Religion of Ancient Israel through the Lens of Divinity (Oxford University Press), Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (Harvard Semitic Monographs), and co-author of Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (SBL Press). He is General Editor of the multi-volume Writings from the Ancient World translation series and the co-editor with Gary Beckman of Text, Artifact, and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion. He is former editor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Hebrew Annual Review. His research has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lewis's multidisciplinary The Origin and Character of God has received the Frank Moore Cross Award from the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) for <"the most substantial volume related to the history and/or religion of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean,>"
the 2021 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies from the American Academy of Religion, and the 2021 Biblical Archaeology Society Biennial Publication Award for the Best Book Relating to the Hebrew Bible.