God's Monsters

God's Monsters is an excellent introduction to scholarship on the supernatural creatures of the Bible with detailed exegesis and careful original translations of important passages and stories. The prose and content are very accessible, especially for anyone with some familiarity with the Bible. It reads somewhat like a pop culture-infused set of freshman lectures on the topic.

But that was also the source of my biggest frustration. The book remains theologically superficial, often seeming to want little more than to shock the believer with the news that God is up to some pretty nasty tricks with an unsavory cast of lackeys. The final (brief) chapter explores this a bit more, but the theologically rich territory of why God might do these things or what the writers of the Bible may have been trying to understand or express takes a back seat to merely gawking at the horrors of the Bible.