FRIENDS OF 17勛圖WEBINARS
What is a God? The Bible and the Ancient Near East
Friends of 17勛圖present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on December 17, 2025, at 7:00 pm EST, presented by Dr. Michael Hundley. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
What is a god? While the question is simple enough, our answer often depends on our cultural context, and we tend to expect other cultures to have the same ideas we do. We also project our modern ideas backward onto ancient texts, overlooking native classifications in the process. However, rather than being a fixed category, the definition of a god is culturally conditioned. With an assist from the Cognitive Science of Religion, this presentation attempts to reconstruct ancient perceptions of gods in the Ancient Near East and the Bible. It draws from and expands upon Dr. Hundley’s , as well as his previous and current book projects.
We begin by surveying the various beings who may qualify as gods in the Bible and the wider Ancient Near East, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Hittite Anatolia. With the data in place, we consider the qualities that all deities share. While gods come in all shapes and sizes, all possess power and agency. To make the divine world more comprehensible, we then sort the divine sphere into categories: high gods (e.g., Egyptian Amun, Mesopotamian Marduk and Assur, Ugaritic El, and biblical YHWH), major gods, minor gods, and peripheral gods. High gods rule, and in the case of Amun, Marduk, Assur, and YHWH, possess a complement of divine powers, like a one-stop shop. Major gods often are specialists (e.g., weather, sun, moon), whereas minor gods serve the high and major gods. Peripheral gods include deified natural phenomena like rivers and mountains, monsters and demons, foreign gods, as well as seemingly inanimate objects like beds and doorposts. Although all gods possess humanlike agency, those closer to the top tend to be the most humanlike internally, making them immediately more understandable and relatable. By contrast, peripheral gods tend to be less humanlike and, as such, more menacing.
The presentation will conclude with a look at the monotheistic redefinition of the god category. Although multiple superhuman beings remain, only one qualifies as a god in the Abrahamic religions (although Christianity divides this god into three persons). Over time Christian tradition reclassifies other erstwhile gods as either good and rebellious angels, thereby dividing the divine world into Team God and Team Satan.
Dr. Michael Hundley (B.A. Amherst College; Ph.D. University of Cambridge) is Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of Memphis. He works at the intersection of human and divine in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the Ancient Near East and has published multiple books and articles, including Keeping Heaven on Earth: Safeguarding the Divine Presence in the Priestly Tabernacle (2011), Gods in Dwellings: Temples and Divine Presence in the Ancient Near East (2013), and Yahweh among the Gods: The Divine in Genesis, Exodus, and the Ancient Near East (2022). He is currently finishing Ancient Gods and Monsters: The Bible, the Ancient Near East, and Beyond and is beginning Temples and Divine Presence in the Bible and Ancient Near East for the Cambridge Elements series. Future projects include a comparison of temples and divine presence in the Bible, Ancient Near East, and Hinduism and an exploration of gendering gods.