Love in the Hebrew Bible - by Song-Mi Suzie Park (Paperback)

About the Book

In Love in the Hebrew Bible, Song-Mi Park provides fascinating and essential insights into our understanding of one of the most central of all Jewish and Christian beliefs: that God is love. Pushing against the wrathful God of the Old Testament narrative, Park shows that love is integral to the ways in which relationships, both among people and also between humanity and God, are imagined in the Hebrew text.

Book Synopsis

Christians insist that love stands at the heart of who God is. Yet, when we talk about love in the Hebrew Bible, how much do we really know?

Possessing such a belief alone does not mean that we possess a clear understanding of what love is. Are we aware of how often divine and human love are tied up with the idea of preference for one individual or group over another? Do we know how often descriptions of love involve questions of power, authority, and gender? Do we see that love is connected to suffering, betrayal, and sometimes death in the Hebrew Scriptures? In Love in the Hebrew Bible, one of the first book-length studies of its kind, Suzie Park provides fascinating and essential insights into these questions, refreshing our understanding of the meaning of love in the Hebrew Bible. Pushing against characterizations of the loving God of the New Testament narrative universe versus the wrathful God of the Old Testament, Park shows that love is integral to the ways in which relationships, both among people and also between humanity and God, are imagined in the Hebrew text. Reflecting matrices of meaning and associations, love thus is a vital component of the ideology and theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, and an understanding of it remains fundamental to our knowledge of the biblical text.

Review Quotes

"What is love? [That is] the question that biblical scholar Song-Mi Suzie Park explores in her excellent new book...Park shows how the biblical narratives suggest that love might be its own entity, perhaps even one that has authority over God. In the Hebrew Bible, Park demonstrates, love is "fraught and complicated." It is "neither one thing or another, but instead is irreducible, everchanging, mysterious, and ultimately unknowable." - Christian Century