Creation

Long before Genesis was written down, the peoples of the ancient Near East were carving, painting and singing their own accounts of how the world began. Othmar Keel, the Swiss scholar known for his work on the images and texts of that region, here joins Silvia Schroer to gather that material together: ancient writings set beside the art that accompanied them, so the two can be studied side by side. Read in that company, familiar biblical passages about creation often come into sharper and stranger focus.

The book is a working resource rather than a single argument, a place to see how Israel's thinking about the origins of the world belonged to a much wider conversation. It will suit students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, and any curious reader who wants to understand the old stories against the backdrop they grew from.