An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers—with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous. As Stavrakopoulou notes, at some point in the history of what became Israel, Hebrew mythology identified the high god, El, with his more active deputy. No one is quite sure, but this seems to be happening well before the great disruption of the Babylonian conquest in the sixth century BCE, though the traces of the older distinction can be seen in some rather laboured passages in Genesis and Exodus where a shift in the divine name has to be explained. On the one hand, this means that the biblical god acquires a double set of robustly physical divine attributes – the more sedentary splendours of the enthroned High God as well as the active and violent characteristics of the warrior storm-god. On the other, it reinforces the sense that the supreme divine power can be the subject of diverse attributes; God is less obviously a straightforwardly amplified physical being, a “big man” – though this does not mean that he loses some of his more toxic gendered qualities. Many of the texts in the Hebrew Bible problematically depict Israel as a woman, using sexualised metaphors — for example, equating idolatry with adultery, or worship of other gods with prostitution. Regularly, macho, hyper-masculine depiction of Yahweh, couched in sexualised language, occurs. Stavrakopoulou is right to point out that there are problems. Biblical scholars have a responsibility to steward, or curate, the biblical texts carefully, and to read ethically.

It is often moving. It shows us how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences, from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. It is richly illustrated, too. These churches were crucial to English, religious and social life, for church services on Sundays weekdays and for feast days, such as the celebrations at Christmas and Easter. The recurrent cycle of baptism, marriage, funerals, the everyday existence of ordinary people in parish churches are at the very centre of the story. The narrative of this book centres on the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1651, when there were rumours of witches and heretics, and the community became ensnared in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. This was the beginning of colonial America, where newly arrived English settlers’ dreams of love and liberty could give way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Gaskill uses previously unexamined sources to tell the tragic story of one family, and through it, to expose an entire society in agonised transition between supernatural obsessions and the coming of a more enlightened age.

We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come to be known as Yahweh. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; by the third century BCE his name had been declared unutterable. We know him best as God.

And, taking the standard philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Job actually knows bupkis about the physical assault — his loss of family, wealth, etc. Therefore, he does not know he is under assault from the eye of god. Stavrakopoulou’s relationship to her evidence shows her respectful and intrigued attitude. For example, she mentions walking barefoot around the footprints at the ‘Ain Dara temple. She draws readers, on multiple occasions, into a “narrative” about the evidence in hand — for example, about the clay ossuary from Pequ‘in — a beautiful way to contextualise or capture readers’ imaginations. The humour of the writing also makes it an entertaining read, and a welcome break from academic writing that is dry, stuffy, and pedantic. What the judges said: “A riveting micro-history, brilliantly set within the broader social and cultural history of witchcraft. Drawing on previously neglected source material, this book is elegantly written and full of intelligent analysis.”This reminds us that religious belief becomes a reality to us only when accompanied by the bodily gestures, intense mental concentration and evocative ceremonial of ritual. Because it imparts sacred knowledge, a myth is recounted in an emotive setting that sets it apart from mundane experience and brings it to life. Because they could no longer perform the impassioned rites of the Jerusalem temple, the traditionally vivid experience of Yahweh became opaque and distant to the Judean exiles in Babylonia. And the complex doctrine of Trinity devised by Greek theologians in the fourth century was not something to be “believed” but was the result of a mental and physical discipline that, accompanied by the rich music and ceremony of the liturgy, enabled Eastern Christians to glimpse the ineffable. First up is The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. Tell us why this one made the shortlist—what makes it one of the best history books of the year?