What Rough Beast?: Images of God in the Hebrew Bible

by David Penchansky

Book Overview

David Penchansky's What Rough Beast? is a study of six Old Testament stories. While many biblical theologies empasize reassuring images of God, Penchansky confronts those biblical passages where God... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0664256457
• ISBN13: 9780664256456
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A frank engagement with oft-neglected biblical texts

In this very readable (but not very comfortable!) book, Penchansky carefully examines five less-frequently-read biblical narratives: God's nocturnal attack on Moses in Exodus 4; God's outbursts against Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10) and Uzzah (2 Samuel 6); King David's fatal census (2 Samuel 24); and Elisha's frightful curse (2 Kings 2). Penchansky also treats Genesis 3, a much more familiar text. In each case, Penchansky squarely faces up to the dark and disturbing images of God portrayed by these texts. He handles these texts with literary skill, theological acumen, and socio-historical imagination. Anyone who is interested in the Hebrew Bible's portrayals of God should read this book. It doesn't tell the whole story (and Penchansky doesn't pretend that it does), but it engages certain biblical ways of imaging God that are often neglected by readers nowadays.

God, it seems as if you never really knew him...

LOOK! This book will shake your age old belief of God as you know him; loving, caring and rational. Penchansky, through elaborate examples from the old testament, paints an interesting and sometimes even disturbing picture of YHWH. Whether you consider yourself Christian, Muslim or atheist, this book will only strengthen your knowledge of the Biblical God. The text itself is very easy to read as all the arguments are well structured adn explained. Although Penchansky never reaches a single conclusion, his "suggestions" are worth reflecting upon.