[A note: this review will contain depictions of nude women from the work being reviewed. Discretion is left to the rea…[A note: this review will contain depictions of nude women from the work being reviewed. Discretion is left to the reader.]The Ancient Near East was a land filled with gods and cosmologies at war with all others. The inhabitants of every nook and cranny had their own deities and their own religious customs and their own emphases. And as with the religions of today, the zealous devotees of one god were not particularly interested in tolerating the gods of their neighbours. It made sense for a culture to have a god different from that of a neighbouring culture—after all, if you wished to war with and then absorb a neighbour, it didn’t make much sense to pray to a god you both worshipped and/or served. Gods of seas, gods of rivers, gods of land, gods of fire, gods of sky, gods of clouds, gods of rain, gods of sex and of war and of death and of life and of alacrity. Take your pick. Different gods for different needs. And all the different practices that go along with those needs.Still, almost across the board in the Ancient Near East, there was a great commonality. These gods received some form of visible rendition. Idols proliferated. Carved images, painted figurines, metaphorical representations. It’s probable that no Philistine actually thought Dagon looked like a hybrid between a fish and a dude, but people need something to hold on to, a little prop to turn mere metaphor into something vaguely solid and believable. But not the people of Israel. Their god, Yahweh, disallowed physical representation of deity (we even see this carried forth into the Islamic antipathy toward the visual expression of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed—and really, any of their prophets). The thing was: Yahweh was considered too vast and magnificent to be represented by something as inarticulate …