2. The Core

Jonah Lynch – July 2020

Premise

This section offers a summary of each chapter of “When on High the Heavens…”, which is currently the core narrative of this website. The printed volume constitutes a linear narrative that presents and supports an interpretation of Mesopotamian and Biblical spiritualities. In the view of the author, the two spiritualities share many features, but are also radically different in their underlying structure. The book presents a comparative approach through many salient features of the spiritualities and the religions they inspire: divination and prophecy, morality and preaching, prayer and mystical experience, and many more topics are dealt with in some detail.

In order to aid the reader in penetrating the network of connections that link the printed volume with the current website, this page contains summaries of each chapter in the book. The summaries serve as a detailed “table of contents” to the website, through the use of hyperlinks from each summary page to more specific essays, the notes, and the bibliography.

Use the menu on the left-hand sidebar to navigate to the chapters of interest, or refer to the more detailed table of contents below.

1. Religion and spirituality

2. Mesopotamia and the Bible

3. The concept of the divine

4. The encounter with the divine

5. Structure of the divine

6. Diachronic developments

7. The “affecting presence”