'You Shall Know Yahweh': Divine Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond

The relationship between the chief Israelite deity Yahweh and his people is often figured in terms of the so-called ‘marriage metaphor’, by which Yahweh is husband and Israel wife. The sexual language used to describe Yahweh’s body and his attitude towards Israel is taken to be a convenient method to outline the thoughts, feelings and expectations Yahweh has of his people in terms of religious practice. However, this has led to various interpretations in which divine sexuality in itself has been labelled ‘pagan’, an activity which Yahweh supposedly ‘transcends’. The aim of this thesis is to question these interpretations. In the first part, an examination of other ancient West Asian literature from Sumer, Ugarit and Egypt, each depicting divine sexuality in stark terms, is completed in order to set a historical mark by which the biblical texts themselves can be judged. In the second, a selection of biblical passages is examined: some from the texts which are structured by the marriage metaphor (as from Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah) and others not (texts about bones, temples, urination, circumcision and loins). Ultimately, one discovers that Yahweh is in fact embroiled within sexuality, whether in the marriage metaphor or not, rather than transcendent above it and that Yahweh’s body, described in heavily masculine terminology throughout the Bible, while indeed sexualized, phallic and perhaps even penised, is nevertheless, ambiguous, liminal or ‘multigendered’ as to the features of his body. It is argued that this does not impede Yahweh’s masculinity but may even work to strengthen it

Riccati type transformations for second-order linear difference equations

AbstractOscillation and comparison theorems for a linear homogeneous second-order difference equation are proved by employing various equivalent non-linear equations obtained by means of transformations analogous to the Riccati transformation for ordinary differential equations

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Journal of botany :being a second series of the Botanical miscellany.

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