Joshua’s declaration, “As for me and my house, we will serve YHWH,” comes from a religious world very different from the universal, philosophical conception of God found in Acts 17. How did the national god of Israel become identified with the all-loving, all-merciful God of later Christianity?
This article reads Genesis in the light of older Mesopotamian material, including the Eridu Genesis, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, and the Sumerian King List. It explores Eden, the serpent, cherubim, Yahweh, and the Psalms as part of a wider ancient Near Eastern world of memory, symbolism, guarded sacred space, and troubled divine-human relations.