Harvard University Press Blog

The Invention of God

How did one god among others become God? This is the basic, and theologically fundamental, enigma that Thomas Römer attempts to illuminate in The Invention of God. The book was originally commissioned for the same French-language series that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century appeared in, a series in which major scholars take their newest and biggest ideas to a broad audience. Our English edition, translated by philosopher Raymond Geuss, is new this month; an excerpt from its Introduction appears below.

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In the religious landscape of humanity, Judaism figures as the most ancient monotheistic religion: it proclaims that there is only one God, who is at the same time the particular god of the people of Israel and also the God of the whole universe. This idea of a single, unique God was then taken over and propagated throughout the world by Christianity and Islam, each of which slightly inflects the original conception in its own way.

When we read the Jewish and Christian Bibles or the Koran, we have the impression that this God was unique since the very beginning; after all, he is the creator of heaven and earth. Looking more closely, though, we find texts in the Bible that admit the existence of other gods: for instance, in the story of the conflict between a man named Jephthah, a military leader of one of the tribes of Israel, and Sihon, the king of one of the neighbors of Israel to the east, which is recounted in the book of Judges. Jephthah uses a theological argument to resolve a territorial dispute: “Do you not possess that which Chemosh, your god, has given into your possession? And shall we not possess that which our God has given into our possession?” (Judg. 11:24). Here the god of Jephthah is considered to be the tutelary deity of a tribe or people, in the same way in which Chemosh is the tutelary god of Sihon. If we read on in the Hebrew Bible, we discover further curious texts. The audience for which the book of Deuteronomy was originally written and to which it is addressed, for instance, is often exhorted not to follow after other gods, without it ever being asserted that these gods did not exist or were not real. So the Bible itself retains traces of the fact that a plurality of gods existed in the Levant, which means also in Israel, and that the god of Israel, whose name was pronounced Yahweh or Yahu, was far from being the only god worshipped by the Israelites.

The biblical narrative, however, contains other surprises. When Yahweh reveals himself to Moses in Egypt, he appears as a previously unknown god. After all, he himself tells Moses that this is the first time he has manifested himself under his real name. Is this a trace of the historical fact that this god was not always the god of Israel? Why, after all, does he reveal himself in Egypt or in the wilderness? Does he have some special connection to these places, and if so, what connection?

On Emily Dickinson’s Birthday

Tenth of December, in addition to being a stellar collection of George Saunders stories, is also Emily Dickinson’s birthday. She was born on this day in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town from which she only rarely strayed. When thinking of the poet’s life, it’s hard not to recall that it was only posthumously that her work was recognized, and even then it was mediated. Poems themselves were notoriously altered for publication, but even the truest transcription removes the poems from their material conditions, about which Dickinson so clearly cared. Two recent projects—one newly announced, the other newly honored—are intended to rectify that disconnect.

The newer project, slated for publication in April, is both the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poetry and the first to draw a distinction between the poems that she herself preserved and those she did not. While her major modern editors have employed a strict chronology in their collections of the poems, editor Cristanne Miller instead presents the poet at work, beginning with her early copying of the poems she wanted to keep onto folded sheets of stationery and progressing through her late poems that were left in a state of chaotic draft, or perhaps experimental fluidity, sometimes on scraps of paper or envelopes.

Through its focus on Dickinson’s own use and retention of poems, Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them proposes a radical shift in the center of gravity of Dickinson studies—away from the letters and the late poems, back to the poet’s most productive years and her fascicle-booklets and unbound sheet poems. In doing so, the book both presents Dickinson’s poems in the order she copied them, and renders visible at a glance the poems she retained in pristine condition and those that include possible substitutions for a concept or thought—a distinction disguised in other reading editions by editorial choices that present hypothesized clean versions of the poems.

The other recent project intended to bring readers closer to Dickinson’s own vision for her work—the open access Emily Dickinson Archive—was awarded first place last month at the New England Publishing Collaboration Awards ceremony. The project, which offers high resolution scans of Dickinson’s manuscripts alongside their best-known transcriptions, was produced by HUP in collaboration with Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Amherst College, Boston Public Library, and nearly a dozen other partners. In General Editor Leslie Morris’s description of the archive, below, one gets a sense of the significance of a volume like Miller’s to longstanding debates over how to represent the variations in Dickinson’s poems and how to meaningfully reflect her unique creative process.

 

Simplified Gift Guide

When considering new book projects, we’ll often ask ourselves: “Who is this book for?” Reverse the variable and flip that around—“Which book is for this person?”—and you have that most common query of the gift-giving season. So let’s see if maybe you know some of the people we’ve got covered.

Artists at Heart
Six Drawing Lessons, by William Kentridge, reveals the studio as a site where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye and the hand become themselves the guides of creativity.

Frustrated Seekers of Hamilton Seats
The late Thomas McCraw’s last work, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and other Immigrants Forged a New Economy, makes up in narrative what it lacks in rhyme.

Big Data Doubters
In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt outlines the implications of the pervasive surveillance to which we now willingly submit, while Frank Pasquale, in The Black Box Society, argues for accountability for the corporate agents who know so much more than we think we’ve shared.

Cross-Pollinators
Mark Winston’s award-winning Bee Time celebrates the long relationship between humans and honeybees, enchanting readers with a life’s worth of lessons from the hive.

Connoisseurs of Creative Chaos
Leland de la Durantaye’s Beckett’s Art of Mismaking is an intellectual adventure into Beckett’s “ruptured writing.”

Mourners of Paris
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project envelops the reader in Parisian ambiance, capturing the relationship between a writer and a city as richly as can be done.

People of the Public Square
With Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler outlines the power and promise of public assembly, shining new light on the collective dimension of dissent.