What Rough Beast? Book Review

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Author David Penchansky wrote, What Rough Beast? Images of God in the Hebrew Bible , in order to challenge certain stories in the Hebrew Bible. He does this by revealing flaws in each of the stories, and also offers his own theories on the subject matter of each reading also. By doing this, Penchansky hopes to persuade the reader that perhaps our god is an evil god. Penchansky writes in great detail about six stories from the Bible: The story of God testing man with the Tree of Life and the Tree of Wisdom in the garden, the story of Uzzah, the “Fatal Census” which is related to David, the story of Nadab and Abihu, the story of Zipporah, Moses, and their son versus God, and lastly the gruesome story of the “Mad Prophet”. With each of these Penchansky makes theories and gives his opinions on why God should be seen as evil. As a whole he brings these stories together to create his thesis that he wraps up in one question, “If all I knew of God I knew from this passage, how would I then understand the divine being?” (Penchansky 3) He offers this question as a thesis that may be used by anyone, and purposely picks these six passages to show God as evil, because this is the point he wants to make. Penchansky starts off by challenging God’s power and decisions in the story of The Garden of Eden. Penchansky writes that God didn’t actually want the humans to eat from the tree, and this is obvious due to the God’s actions, “It is therefore hard to accept that YHWH/Elohim intended the humans…all his actions indicate otherwise.” (Penchansky 8) He challenges God’s power when he writes about the humans’ actions and God’s reactions. He writes about how God is obviously not almighty and all powerful seeing that the Humans disobeyed him, and in anger, he banished them from the Garden, “A firm threat, he thought, was sufficient to keep the humans away. It didn’t…to that of
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