My sister, Rebekah–formerly of ThinkHardThinkWell, now at The Primary Word–will present a summary of her Honors Thesis at Philadelphia Biblical University on Wednesday, November 4.  The lecture is entitled, “YHWH’s Cult Statues: ‘Image of God’ in an Ancient Near Eastern Context.”  It will be held at 8 PM in classroom BL225.  If you are available that evening, please do consider coming and also feel free to invite others to this event.  This will be a fun and interesting lecture–see the abstract below.

If you can’t make it, you should still read her earlier posts here entitled, “YHWH’s Cult Statues” (part1, part 2).

See you there!

_____

Abstract: “YHWH’s Cult Statues: ‘Image of God’ in an Ancient Near Eastern Context.”

Most Christians in our culture know the Bible teaches that humans were created in the “image of God,” however, there is much debate on what precisely this means. Some scholars on ancient Mesopotamian religions suppose that the reason the ancient Israelites were commanded by their God not to make “graven images” is because humanity was created in the “image of God.” Therefore, YHWH God, unlike the gods of the polytheistic Mesopotamian peoples, was not to be represented in statuary form (the graven image), for humanity was created as YHWH’s unique form of divine representation. This lecture will discuss the function of Mesopotamian cult statues as divine representation in order to better understand the term “image of god” in an ancient Near Eastern context and also how humans may function as images of YHWH God.