‘God’s Monsters’ by Esther Hamori: A Review

Esther J. Hamori. God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible. Broadleaf Books, 2023. Hardcover. $28.99. Pp. viii + 296. ISBN 9781506486321.

INTRODUCTION¹

With apologies to Tertullian, what does horror have to do with the Bible?² As it turns out, quite a bit. It is not merely that horror writers and film makers use the Bible in iconic ways,³ like when Carrie’s mother physically and verbally abuses her while quoting or alluding to stories from the Bible.⁴ Nor is it how biblical themes and ideas serve as plot points, like how Noah’s ark and demonic beings play an important part in the horror of Christopher Golden’s Ararat.⁵ Rather, there is horror in the Bible itself. Monsters stalk its pages, ghostly apparitions flutter and float in its prose, and demons poke and prod in its poetry. But even seasoned readers of the biblical texts may miss these entities thereby making Esther Hamori’s book God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible an insightful and necessary read.

SUMMARY

In the volume’s introduction (“Monster Heaven”), Hamori presents the monstrous entourage that is often in the employ of God as we encounter him in the Hebrew Bible. Noting the characteristics that monsters tend to share (gigantism, superhuman strength, and so on), she describes the biblical God as “the monster of monsters” (p. 7) and explains that so many of the Bible’s monsters are sent by the deity to do his bidding, often in the form of retribution and horrific punishment. These creatures, then, speak to ancient theology: God is not to be trifled with. 

Chapter 1, which opens up part 1 of the volume (“God’s Entourage”) is a deep dive into the world of seraphim, those mysterious creatures featured prominently in Isaiah 6. Hamori, however, does not begin in Isaiah but in the book of Numbers and the story of the “poisonous serpents” (Numbers 21:6, NRSVue).⁶ These burning snakes (the word saraph means something like “burning”) act on God’s behalf, punishing the Israelites for their insolence. They are only rescued when Moses erects a serpent of bronze upon which bitten Israelites may look and live. Our author notes that such serpents were common in ancient imagery, especially in Egypt where the uraeus was featured in stamp seals. In some depictions, they are winged, in keeping with the depiction of the seraphim from Isaiah 6: “Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet [i.e., genitals], and with two they flew” (v. 2). And like those seraphim in Numbers 21, these in Isaiah 6 are too associated with fire: “The seraph touched my mouth with [a live coal]” (v. 7). Hamori highlights here the monstrous nature of these creatures as well as their role within God’s entourage and what they tell us about the deity. They are fearful of him but do his bidding at a moment’s notice: “As lethal and frightening as these serpentine monsters are, they’re a mere reflection of the source of greater danger,” she writes (p. 38).

In ch. 2, Hamori considers cherubim, creatures that make their first appearance in Genesis 3: “He drove out the humans, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life” (v. 21). These creatures are apparently part of a family of “hybrid guardian monsters found all over ancient Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean” (p. 41). The hybridity stems from descriptions of these entities from texts like Ezekiel 1 wherein a single cherub has multiple faces and mismatched bodily features: a human hand here, calves’ feet there, and wings to boot. Hamori notes how in the various depictions of cherubim one finds in the HB, they are oft-depicted as ferocious guardians of sacred spaces. For example, they guard the entrance to Eden in Genesis. They also sit upon the Ark of the Covenant, wings outstretched over the so-called mercy seat. Even in Ezekiel’s vision, the cherubim act as guardians, removing the deity from Jerusalem due to the sins of its people. But more than guardians, they are Yahweh’s violent henchmen, performing acts of violence at his bidding. Thus, as our author notes, when the Bible describes Yahweh as the one “enthroned upon [or among] the cherubim” (e.g., Psalm 80:1), it is hardly a comforting notion. “The cherubim emanate divine anger,” she writes. “Narrators and characters alike whip out this phrase when God’s destruction is on the horizon” (p. 67). This holds true even for their appearance in the New Testament, specifically the book of Revelation where they become hybrids of the seraphim and cherubim of the Jewish scriptures. It is these creatures, she notes, who order John to witness the breaking of the seven seals, an action that (among other things) unleashes the four horsemen (Revelation 6:1-2). 

With ch. 3, our author turns to the Adversary or, as you might know him, (the) Satan. She notes that the term satan is in the HB a noun and is used of both divine and human figures. For example, in Numbers 22:32, the angel obstructing the road such that Balaam’s donkey, who alone can see the angel initially, stops in his tracks refers to himself as the prophet’s satan, “adversary.” Before he became king of Israel, the Philistines referred to David as a satan, fearing that he might attack them while the Philistine king Achish hosted him (1 Samuel 29:4). In the book of Job, the term is used to refer to a veritable prosecutor who works on God’s behalf. Hamori, in a clever and illuminating reading of the work, notes how the satan is in God’s employ, controlled in his actions by the deity. In fact, while many readers of Job view the satan with contempt, our author demonstrates that the most ignoble figure in the story is Yahweh himself who does terrible things to the protagonist: “Job doesn’t suffer despite his innocence. He suffers because of it” (p. 91). Also instructive is the way in which the Chronicler redacts his source in 2 Samuel, changing the who of the individual responsible for inciting David to sin (and, thereby, incurring divine wrath) from Yahweh (2 Samuel 24:1) to Satan (1 Chronicles 21:1). Here the noun lacks the definite article, a step toward the figure more familiar from the New Testament. This redaction highlights something often missed in our reading of the account in 2 Samuel but one Hamori notes: “When Satan was still cutting his teeth on some fairly rudimentary work – enticing a man with enormous power to use it wrongly is low-hanging fruit on the temptation tree – God was already a pro, having done this in the older version of the story” (p. 99). This continues to develop a theme recurring in God’s Monsters – God is often monstrous himself. 

Angels become the main subject of ch. 4: “the most ruthless of God’s soldiers, the deadliest of all his divine hitmen” (p. 106). Hamori surveys both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in examining these beings, noting that they are shapeshifting realm-crossers who appear human but are nothing short of alarming. For example, the Destroyer is the name of an entity that delivers the final plague in Exodus: the killing of the firstborn (Exodus 12:23). Our author notes that in Exodus this death-bringer isn’t referred to as an angel, but later traditions tie the plagues to “a company of destroying angels” (Psalm 78:49) who do the deity’s bidding. And the Destroyer shows up in 1 Chronicles 21:15 where it is explicitly an angel. Angels also show up to kill Assyrian soldiers (2 Kings 19:35), give Herod Agrippa worms that eat him from the inside out (Acts 12:21-23), and unleash hell on earth in the book of Revelation (e.g., Revelation 8:6-9:21). Angels, Hamori observes, are a lot like us in that they can be both benevolent and malevolent, comforting and dangerous. “There’s no Angel of Death in the Bible,” she writes, “because every angel who shows up might have come as an angel of death” (pp. 135-136). 

Chapter 5 is titled “Demons in God’s Ranks” and in it our author explores nefarious entities often in God’s employ. “In the Hebrew Bible, demons are simply a manifestation of deadly power,” she writes (p. 139). Lamenting the ways in which many English translations gloss over Hebrew nouns that likely refer to demonic entities, Hamori gives readers a panoply of names marking these wicked beings: Dever, Qetev, Mavet, Abbadon, and more. The first two, Dever and Qetev, make an appearance in Psalm 91: “For he will deliver you from…deadly Dever…. You will not fear…Qetev that stalks in darkness” (vv. 3, 6). Our author quips that while the psalm is often called a “psalm of assurance,” it is “assuring in about the same way as a parent telling a kid, ‘There is definitely a monster under your bed, but I won’t let it get you’” (p. 140). Of course, sometimes the parent just lets the monster run loose, as Yahweh does when he unleashes the demons Barad (often rendered “hail”) and Resheph (often rendered “thunderbolts”) on Egypt per Psalm 78’s account of the plagues of Exodus (Psalm 78:48). Hamori also considers the way that God distances himself from demonic beings in the New Testament, repudiating them while at the same time reassigning their work load to his own angels. 

In ch. 6, Hamori discusses various spirits who operate as “God’s psychological warfare experts” (p. 170). One interesting example put forward by our author comes from 1 Kings 22 wherein the prophet Micaiah is summoned to appear before the wicked Israelite king Ahab to prophesy on the outcome of a potential battle. Micaiah reveals to the king a conspiracy straight from heaven wherein Yahweh enlisted the aid of a spirit to enter the mouths of Ahab’s prophets to lie to him and entice him into a battle that he was sure to lose and in which he would die. “So you see,” Micaiah tells Ahab, “the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has decreed disaster for you” (1 Kings 22:23). As Hamori notes,  the deity has engaged in deception, employing a faithful member of his host to give Ahab’s prophets a false message: “The spirit plants the specific lie, but the greater treachery is God’s,” she writes (p. 176). Other spirits in the HB appear to torment monarchs, create division, and just manipulate generally. The New Testament too has a world of spirits in its background, good and evil. And as he sent the lying spirit of Micaiah’s vision, God sends (in the NRSVue) “a powerful delusion” which, Hamori points out, uses a Greek term (energeia) that suggests agency, a “supernatural operation of deceit” (p. 193). To close the chapter, our author cheekily observes that per the book of Revelation no one who practices falsehood can enter the new Jerusalem. “This,” she quips, “could pose a problem for the Almighty” (p. 200).

Chapter 7 opens up part 2 of God’s Monsters (“The Monsters Beneath”) and looks at one of the Bible’s more interesting creatures: Leviathan, the sea monster. She notes that the creature tends to have a singular function in biblical narrative: “The primary role of the sea monster in the Bible is not to kill, but to be killed” (p. 207). In Psalm 78, for example, the psalmist recounts the mighty deeds of Yahweh, drawing upon motifs of ancient Canaanite lore wherein a deity does battle with a fearsome sea monster: Litan in the Baal Cycle and Leviathan in the HB. The so-called “twisting serpent” may be God’s foe in texts like Isaiah 27:1, but others suggest that Leviathan is God’s pet and even the pinnacle of creation. Leviathan is profiled by God in his diatribe against Job and Hamori draws comparisons between the deity’s description of the beast with what we find in a genre of ancient poetry known as wasf. Such poetry often extolled the physical prowess or attractiveness of someone as “an expression of intimate knowledge and passionate love” (p. 221). In Job 41, it is this dragon that the deity adores and to whom he is most loyal.

In ch. 8, Hamori surveys those texts that discuss shades, ghosts, and other “living dead.” Since the afterlife in ancient Israelite religion was nothing like what we find in later Christian tradition, we sometimes overlook just how strange it can be. The “shades” are the dead who end up in the underworld, never to return. Regardless of social status, all end up in the same place and enjoy an existence that is hardly enjoyable. Hamori notes that various texts depict shades as needing to be shaken to be aroused: “Their default state is a sort of suspended animation,” she writes (p. 232). When Saul asks the necromancer of Endor to summon the recently deceased Samuel, the ghostly prophet asks Saul (in the NRSVue), “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” (1 Samuel 28:15) Hamori takes issue with translations like this because it misses what is really going on. Samuel isn’t “disturbed” by being brought up. He is “shaken” so that he might be brought up. “It’s not that being summoned disturbed Samuel,” she writes, “but that his ghost had to be shaken awake in the underworld in order for it to be raised” (p. 236). Samuel was in a state of eternal slumber; to be reawakened he needed to be shaken. 

The subject of giants is taken up in ch. 9. The first hint at giants comes from the story of the crossbreeding between divine beings and human women recorded in Genesis 6:4. In the MT, the result is the nephilim; in the LXX, it is the giants. “The partly human, partly divine nephilim are the ultimate category violation,” writes Hamori, “who are the product of the ultimate boundary violation” (p. 244). There are other giants too, like those the scouts encounter and report back following their venture into Canaan (Numbers 13). According to Deuteronomy 1:28, giant people came with giant cities complete with giant walls. Other giants also appear in biblical texts like King Og of Bashan or Goliath of Gath. Whoever they are, they often serve as foils for God’s people: “Biblical giants are born to be conquered,” our author observes” (p. 256). But this is commentary on how people in general treat the Other. Turning them into monsters gives us the pretext to do all sorts of horrible things to them, as history shows.

Part 3 of Hamori’s work is comprised of a single chapter: “The Monster of Monsters, the Wonder of Wonders.” In it, she presents to readers the Bible’s monster par excellence – God himself. She queries, “If monsters reveal something about their world, what do the monsters of God’s entourage reveal?” (p. 264) In short, the answer is, that God himself is a kind of monster. He is gigantic, possesses superpowers, is sometimes amorphous and sometimes concrete, can shapeshift, and can cross realms. Our author argues that God’s monstrosity is in keeping with the depictions of other deities from the ancient world and that “the defining trait of gods isn’t goodness – it’s power” (p. 267). And who is more powerful than Yahweh? To close the chapter, Hamori looks at the Bible itself, noting its “complicated relationship with God and God’s monstrosity” (p. 269). She decries the cherry-picking performed by readers of these ancient texts and contends that wrestling with God’s behaviors is a veritable Jewish pastime: “The validity of calling God out is part of biblical tradition,” she writes (p. 270). The Bible is itself  a testament to the ways in which these ancient people thought about the world around them and tried to find a way to understand it, an activity as human as it gets. 

REACTION

I must confess that it took me a lot longer than I anticipated to read God’s Monsters. At first, I kept picking it up only to put it back down. One of the issues I had with it was Hamori’s style. It felt too colloquial, almost informal. Another issue I had was the content. Didn’t I already know a lot about seraphim and cherubim? As I read the chapter on the former, I could feel myself growing bored and, consequently, started skimming instead of actively engaging the prose before me. I would close the volume and turn to some other more interesting text. At times, I put the book back on the shelf rather than in the usual spot I place books I’m currently reading. In this way I was telling myself that God’s Monsters was a book I just wasn’t going to finish because it just wasn’t very good. 

But then two things happened. First, I finished reading Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, a story about monsters, albeit of the vampiric variety. Second, I was looking through my Goodreads account and noticed sitting there, at 3% read (or whatever it was at that moment), Hamori’s book. Feeling guilty for not completing it, I vowed to try again. But this time I would start over – completely over. Additionally, I would strive to read the text for what it was and not whatever preconceived notion I had it should have been. Let me say, I’m glad I did, because Hamori’s work is not only learned but her style is what drives it. Allow me to explain. 

There is a certain kind of reverent irreverence in how our author presents the monsters she discusses. Take, for example, her examination in the volume’s opening chapter of Numbers 21 and the story of the bronze serpent. In that account, the Israelites grow discouraged and grumble to Moses that God brought them into the wilderness from the safety of Egypt to die of starvation and thirst. In response, the deity sends what the NRSVue calls “poisonous serpents” (Numbers 21:6) who bite so that those who are bitten quickly die. Hamori, sensitive to the text’s violence, responds to it by writing, “God lashes out like an oversensitive dictator” (p. 17).⁷ Drawing comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, she also notes that these “seraphim snakes” (an arguably more accurate rendering of the underlying Hebrew)⁸ are an unnatural bunch, an element “pivotal to the plot” since it depicts the attack as something only God is able to direct. She even calls into question the deity’s instruction to Moses to create a bronze image of a seraphim snake that, when looked upon, can heal those who have been bitten. “[W]hat sort of resolution is that?” she queries (p. 19). 

Many more examples of what I have dubbed “reverent irreverence” appear in God’s Monsters, and they reach their zenith in the volume’s final chapter. There Hamori let’s God have it: “Every biblical monster torturing, gaslighting, bloodying, and slaughtering people on God’s orders is a neon sign pointing to its commander, the God-monster” (p. 265). Our author does not let God off the hook. More conservative readers, especially Christian apologists, will take issue with Hamori’s castigation of God but, as far as this reader is concerned, she hits the nail on the head. Ancient gods could be all good or all powerful but never both. Why should Yahweh be any different? “Modern assumptions that God must be all good aren’t based on the Bible,” Hamori writes. Those assumptions, she goes on to argue, neuter the language used of God such that his monstrosity is diminished.⁹ 

One of the more interesting chapters in the volume is ch. 5 entitled “Demons in God’s Ranks.” To be clear, our author is not referring to Satan, having already covered him in ch. 3. (Spoiler alert: in the HB, he is not generally a diabolical figure.) Instead, Hamori covers a host of demonic entities whose existence is often obscured by English translation. For example, in Habakkuk 3 the prophet praises Yahweh and describes a vision wherein the deity makes a grand appearance. In v. 4 he says, “The brightness was like the sun; rays came forth from his hand, where his power lay hidden.” Hamori takes issue with translations like this and argues that within the final clause of v. 4 “lays hidden” an ancient Canaanite demon. The phrase rendered in the NRSVue as “lay hidden” is in Hebrew the substantive ḥebyôn, a noun that appears only here in the entirety of the HB. She proposes that ḥebyôn is a reference to Haby or Habayu, a figure from ancient Ugaritic texts described as possessing horns and a tail.¹⁰ Here in Habakkuk, Hebyon is a member of the divine entourage alongside Dever (“pestilence”) and Resheph (“plague”) in v. 5. Writes Hamori, “God rolls in, shooting laser beams from his hand, and like any good ancient Southwest Asian god, he brings backup” (p. 153). 

Haby also makes an appearance in Isaiah 26:20. Here is Hamori’s translation: “Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut your door behind you – it’s Haby! – for just a moment, until the Wrath has passed” (p. 154).¹¹ It is noteworthy that, as our author observes, this section in Isaiah hosts “a stunning concentration of dangerous mythological figures” (p. 155), from the demon Mavet (“death”) in Isaiah 25:7 to “shades” in 26:14 to the sea monster Leviathan in 27:1. Hamori’s analysis underscores both the importance of cultural considerations when interpreting these ancient texts as well as how many modern English translations, often in service to Christian sympathies, do us a disservice. 

CONCLUSION

Hamori respects the Bible enough to dig into it and provide an exegesis that is historically and linguistically informed. And she also knows that the reception history of those texts is fraught with difficulty because they have been often used as a pretext to target vulnerable people. This allows her to acknowledge the Bible’s problems and steer a course that, to borrow from Richard Elliot Friedman, permits us to pay respect to what is heartening about the Bible without denying its more troubling aspects.¹² Additionally, her use of monster theory to examine the texts that she does makes for an interesting read that somehow retains its academic seriousness while presenting as a popular level work. God’s Monsters, I believe, is the best of both worlds. 

But I must admit that I disagree with one of Hamori’s editors. The answer to the question of whether a footnote is needed is always yes.

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1. Throughout the endnotes readers will find various abbreviations. For a list of what abbreviations I use and the works to which they refer, please see the page “Commonly Used Abbreviations.”  ↩︎
2. Cf. Tertullian, Praescr. 7. ↩︎
3. On this, see Steve A. Wiggins, Holy Horror: The Bible and Fear in Movies (McFarland, 2018), 40-61. ↩︎
4. Stephen King, Carrie (Anchor Books, 2013 [originally published 1974]), “Blood Sport.” ↩︎
5. Christopher Golden, Ararat: A Novel (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017). My review of Golden’s volume is available at my website. ↩︎
6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.  ↩︎
7. When the people respond to God’s sending of the serpents, they beg Moses to “take away the serpents from us” (Numbers 21:7). The substantive “serpents,” however, is in Hebrew singular (הַנָּחָ֑שׁ [hannāḥāš]) and not plural. Robert Alter (The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary [W.W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:551) dubs this an example of a “collective noun, a common idiomatic pattern for animals in biblical usage.”  ↩︎
8.  הַנְּחָשִׁ֣ים הַשְּׂרָפִ֔ים (hannǝḥāšîm haśśǝrāpîm).  ↩︎
9. On some of God’s monstrous aspects, especially his gigantism, see, e.g., Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 103-104. Cf. Brandon R. Grafius, Reading the Bible with Horror, Horror and Scripture (Lexington Books/Fortress Press, 2020), 125-142. ↩︎
10. See CAT 1.114.19-20: “Habayu then berates him [i.e., El], He of two horns and a tail.” Translation taken from “El’s Divine Feast,” translated by Theodore J. Lewis, in Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, edited by Simon B. Parker,” WAW 9 (Society of Biblical Literature, 1997).  ↩︎
11. Hamori (p. 155) notes that English translations typically treat the underlying Hebrew term חֲבִ֥י (ḥăbî) as a verb but, she writes, “if it’s a verb, that verb is a mess, dead wrong on multiple levels….The word as it stands…is precisely the Hebrew equivalent of the Ugaritic Haby.” ↩︎
12. See Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎