God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World.

• Author: Lenzi, Alan
• Position: Book review

God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World. By MARK S. SMITH. Grand Rapids, Mich.: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY, 2010. Pp. xxvi + 382. $18 (paper).

This volume, which first appeared in 2008 as volume 57 of the Forschungen zum Alien Testament series (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck), is fundamentally a response to ideas presented by Jan Assmann in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997) and The Price of Monotheism (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010 [original German, 2003]).

Smith's goals in this book are threefold: first, to elaborate upon Jan Assmann's treatment of translatability of divinity in the ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds; second, to challenge and overturn Assmann's idea that the biblical tradition completely lacks any notion of translatability of divinity (Assmann's "Mosiac Distinction")--a lynch pin, according to Smith, in Assmann's theory that Mosaic monotheism, in contrast to polytheism, is inherently intolerant and prone to violence; and third, to enrich our understanding of ancient authors' notions of deity as presented in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts. Smith's study casts a wide net both chronologically and geographically, and his research runs deep, as the copious footnotes attest. The brief summary offered here cannot do justice to the cornucopia of evidence he has arrayed. Taken as a whole, Smith has persuasively debunked Assmann's claim about the absence of translatability in the Bible itself. Whether that success overturns Assmann's claims about the relationship between biblically based monotheism and violence, however, is another matter.

Drawing on a solid theoretical base, Smith understands translatability of deity as taking two forms: horizontal translatability, which is "the recognition of others' divinity across (and even despite) cultural [and geographic] boundaries" (p. 96); and vertical translatability, which is the "translation of divinity through time within a particular culture" (p. 81). Biblical authors utilized horizontal translatability in texts from the early monarchy. Starting in Neo-Assyrian times and extending on into the Common Era, however, the biblical authors turned more and more to vertical translatability; that is, they drew on and developed earlier concepts of the biblical deity due to the pressure of changing imperial contexts that threatened Israelite, Jewish, and eventually Christian religious identities.

Smith begins his study in the...