God's Monsters

When not domesticated, translated over (or out), or sanitized, the Jewish Bible and Christian New Testament are filled with seraphim, cherubim, Adversaries (a satan, the satan, and Satan), destroying angels, hidden demons, gaslighting spirits of disinformation, sea monsters, post-life ghosts, and giants. Esther J. Hamori, in God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible, is an accessible, scholarly guide on a thinking-with-monsters-and-the-monstrous journey through the “Book of Wonder” (267). There are times in Hamori’s tour when the reader, like Hamori’s own students, may need a moment, not because the ancient authors believed in fantastic creatures but because monsters working for and with God “raise questions” (9). But first, we have to see what Hamori is revealing.

Funny, direct, and pop-culture informed, Hamori's terrifying tour of monsters and the monstrous in the Bible is in three parts: monsters who work for God (God’s Entourage), monsters of nature, death, and culture (The Monsters Beneath), and the commander of the monsters, God (The God-Monster). Her book shines a light on and wrestles with aspects of the biblical texts that are distressing but she pastorily suggests early on that the Book of Life teaches not just with “comfort and hope” but also with a recognition of  our “troubled reality” because “the acknowledgement of the grim has a comfort all its own” (9).

Seraphim and Cherubim are God’s hybrid border guards of social, cultural, and sacred space. Deadly, winged, multi-armed serpents crying “holy, holy, holy” about the Lord of Armies,  Seraphim are sent by God to kill Israelites with burning venom in the desert and burn the lips of prophets with coal in heaven (22). The cherubim are not chubby babies, but composite beasts who work as God’s bouncers at the door of Eden, guards of the “holy of holies,” sentinel statues in the Temple, and arsonists to burn down a city at God’s order (65). If you are tempted to try to wriggle out of facing these revealtions with a “cherubim of the Old Testament work for an angry God but the cherubim of the New Testament work for a Good God” move, Hamori counters with the Book of Revelation’s “four living creatures”, “next-gen” cherubim (69) who hand out plagues in weaponized bowls to angels (70).

God works with a satan and the Satan. Not yet a full-blown Devil, the Adversary in Job is a prosecutor in the heavenly council where God permits the entrapment of an innocent person. When questioned by the blameless Job, God, from the whirlwind, identifies with a sea monster and refuses to be questioned. The Satan-God teamwork continues in the Gospel of Luke (22:31), letters attributed to Paul (2 Cor 12:7-9, 1 Cor 5:5, 1 Tim 1:20), and the messages to churches at the start of Revelation (2:10).

God sends malevolent, destroying angels who carry swords (but no mention of wings). No wonder angel visitations start with “don’t be afraid,” as when angels visit Mary or the shepherds in Luke. The angel at Passover kills. An angel of the Lord strikes down Herod Agrippa (he is eaten by worms in Acts 12:21-23). Angel soldiers with flames in Thessalonians “dole out vengeance” (124). When humans are harvested at the end of time in the book of Revelation, the reapers are angels who “throw them into furnaces of fire” (123). Also in Revelation, a fallen angel named Wormwood poisons the water (127) and the angels have a bloody “winepress” full of people. Having sung the Shalom Aleichem in synogogue, Hamori notes how, after her research, it sounds like a vaguely “worried plea” for angels to leave in peace (136).

Demons work for God even when their names are hidden in translation, such as Dever (Pestilence) and Qetev (Destruction), Mavet (Death, the fourth horsemen Rev 6:8), Resheph (Plague, who Jerome rendered diabolus in Latin, Habakkuk 3), and Barad (Hail). And we are not even to what Hamori calls Psy Ops yet. Disinformation, lies, falsehoods, and false prophecies are sent via spirits who stand before God and volunteer for these missions. The only monsters God doesn’t employ or defend in the Bible are “foreign” giants who God moves off the land for the Israelites to conquer (257). The stories of conquest monsterize other people to justify killing them, like a hero monster-slayer, and taking their land.

Hamori reminds her readers of how biblical authors revise earlier stories, she cuts to the chase on scholarly disputations such as the gender of the biblical God (male, 7), she honors the gap between biblical stories and history (253), and points out what the text says in Hebrew, such as when the text says God is “terrible” (38). She offers illustrations from her teaching experiences (Adam and Eve as “dirt boy” and “life girl”) and the news (Paula White’s speech to protect Trump, the killing of Michael Brown), and is familiar with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory (37, 246).  But Hamori is at her best when she is making theological meaning about and with monsters for the people in a relationship with the Bible and the God of the Bible.

Hamori writes that we share with the biblical authors a recognition of how dangerous and painful life can be. Like Adam and Eve, our eyes are opened to know good and evil (even when God seems to be doing the evil). Like biblical characters, we can survive horrors (60). Rejecting the Nixonian out (in the Frost interviews) of “if God does it, it cannot be monstrous,” engaging the Bible and its monsters means wrestling with an ancient anthology about power. Hamori looks into the abyss, but instead of slaying monsters (or becoming a monster herself, as Nietzsche warned), she thinks with them. She is a better guide for her readers than Virgil is for Dante because she can go the distance, biblically and theologically.

Rita Lester is professor of religion and director of gender and sexuality studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

Rita Lester

Date Of Review:

January 30, 2024