The book is useful for exploring how language about God should be understood (via analogy, symbols, the via negativa or something else). Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.

This Yahweh is the god whom Francesca Stavrakopoulou – professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the university of Exeter – anatomises. Numerous passages are provided to support her thesis as she moves from looking at those which focus on his feet, to his legs, torso and finally head. Joseph Smith, Discourse, 7 April 1844, as reported in the Times and Seasons, August 15, 1844, 5:613, online at josephsmithpapers. She takes Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous picture of the dead (and prematurely decaying) body of Christ as illustrating the way in which Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy ends up in a conspicuously unbiblical position, presenting human bodies as “repulsive” (her word), unfit to portray the divine.Second, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans after 1354, which transformed the Ottoman state into a trans-continental empire. Translators, too, have long sanitised the text, privileging the abstract and metaphysical over the corporeal. Her investigation, more like a reclamation, takes her through the Bible text to lift up, pick apart and examine the very physical body of the supreme being described there: his feet, his hands, his face, even his private parts.

Courtney Hall Lee in her book, Black Madonna, develops this further by showing how womanism not only applies to Jesus, but also to Mary.This provocative work will surprise and may shock, but it brings to light aspects of the biblical account of God that modern readers seldom appreciate.