God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World

The Hebrew Bible has long been understood as condemning foreign deities. While many biblical texts do condemn other deities, many other passages show how early Israelites sometimes accepted the reality of deities worshiped by other peoples. Looking closely both at relevant biblical texts and at their cultural contexts, Mark S. Smith demonstrates that the biblical attitude toward other deities is not uniformly negative, as is commonly supposed. He traces the historical development of Israel’...