Putthoff Tyson L. Gods and Humans in the Ancient Near East

Cambridge University Press, 2020. — 269 p. — ISBN 978-1-108-49054-2In many ways, this book serves as the ‘prequel’ to my previous monograph (Putthoff 2017). There I looked at early Jewish beliefs about what happens to humans who encounter the divine directly. Throughout that project, I knew that there must have been even more ancient beliefs about similar matters. So I continued to expand my scope, during and after my doctoral work, to look at what others in the ancient world thought about such ideas. In this book, I therefore go farther back in near eastern history to look at the relationship between gods and humans and between the divine nature and human nature. In the third book in this project, also complete and soon to be in print, I explore the same ideas in the Apostle Paul’s writings.
In this book, I argue that, in the Ancient Near East, gods lived both among humans and within humans. To be sure, the two groups shared the world with one another, each playing a unique role in maintaining
order in the cosmos. However, more than sharing the world with the gods, humans also had a share in their nature. Even in their natural condition, humans enjoyed a taste of the divine state. Indeed, gods not
only lived among humans but they lived inside them, taking up residence in the physical body the same way they did inside images and statues. As such, human nature was actually a composite of humanity and divinity.