--- title: "Francesca Stavrakopoulou" description: "Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Exeter and an outspoken atheist. Her book God: An Anatomy reconstructs the very physical, embodied deity behind the biblical text." canonical: https://opendoubt.com/people/francesca-stavrakopoulou source: html --- # Francesca Stavrakopoulou > Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Exeter and an outspoken atheist. Her book God: An Anatomy reconstructs the very physical, embodied deity behind the biblical text. Notable figure # Francesca Stavrakopoulou Biblical Scholar & Professor of Hebrew Bible · b. 1975 Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter and one of the very few senior academic biblical scholars in Britain who is also a public atheist. Her work sits at the intersection of textual analysis, archaeology, and the comparative religion of the ancient Near East. She is best known outside the academy for the 2011 BBC series _The Bible’s Buried Secrets_ and the 2021 book [_God: An Anatomy_](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55554434-god) — a reconstruction of the embodied, very physical deity behind the biblical text. She makes a particular kind of contribution to public conversation about religion. She is not a polemicist, not a popularizer of arguments from analytic philosophy, not a deconvert. She is a working scholar describing what the texts and the dirt actually say when you stop assuming, before you read them, that they are sacred. The result is one of the most quietly devastating positions in contemporary religion writing: the Bible is more interesting, not less, when you give up the doctrine that it is true. Core positions The Bible is a human document, studied historically Stavrakopoulou's working assumption — shared with most academic biblical scholars but routinely surprising to general readers — is that the Hebrew Bible is a library of texts written by particular humans in particular historical situations, and should be read with the same critical apparatus as any other ancient corpus. The God of the Bible is embodied and ancient Near Eastern Her most famous popular book, God: An Anatomy, argues that the biblical God was originally one Levantine deity among many — with a body, a family, and a fairly conventional CV. Later theological tradition stripped the body away. The texts still show the original. Atheism is the position the evidence supports She is unusually public about being an atheist for a senior Hebrew Bible scholar, particularly in the UK. Her case is that decades of close reading of the texts and the archaeology has given her no reason to think there is anyone behind them — only people, doing what people do with religion. Religious history is fascinating without being true A consistent theme of her writing and TV work is that you do not need to believe a religion is true in order to find it serious, weird, beautiful, or worth a lifetime of careful study. The fascination and the disbelief are compatible — in her case, mutually reinforcing. > The God of the Hebrew Bible has a body. He walks, he eats, he wrestles, he has a face people see and survive — or do not. The bodiless God of later theology is a philosophical invention. The textual God is something stranger, older, and more interesting. ## God: An Anatomy _God: An Anatomy_ (2021) is structured around the body parts of the biblical deity — feet, genitals, torso, arms, head — and walks the reader through what the Hebrew Bible actually says about each, with the relevant archaeology and comparative material from Ugarit, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The cumulative argument is that the God of the biblical authors was a recognizable Iron Age Levantine sky-and-storm deity — with a consort, a court, and a body — and that the abstract incorporeal God of later Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a philosophical overlay added centuries after the texts were written. ## On atheism and being a biblical scholar Francesca Stavrakopoulou — interview ## Essential books [God: An Anatomy2021Her landmark popular work — the body of the biblical God, head to toe, reconstructed from the texts and the archaeology](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55554434-god)[King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice2004Her doctoral monograph — child sacrifice as a real, normal feature of Iron Age Judahite religion](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2330717.King_Manasseh_and_Child_Sacrifice)[Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims2010On the ancestral cult lurking under the surface of the Hebrew Bible](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9577014-land-of-our-fathers) ## Best quotes > “The God of the Bible is not a bodiless, transcendent abstraction. He has a face, a torso, arms, legs, and genitals. The biblical writers describe him that way because that is who they thought he was.” > “I'm an atheist with a huge interest in religion. There is no contradiction in that. I find religion endlessly fascinating precisely because I don't think it is true.” > “The Bible is a brilliantly important book — but it is not the divinely revealed text its readers usually assume. It is a library of ancient Near Eastern literature, written by humans, about a god who looks an awful lot like the gods of the surrounding cultures.” > “Child sacrifice is in the Bible. It is not at the margins. The texts work hard to suppress it, and they do not entirely succeed.” > “Reading the Bible as history requires giving up the idea that it is on its own side. It is a partisan source for a particular elite. It is not a neutral record.” ## Follow her work Find Francesca Stavrakopoulou [@ProfFrancesca](https://x.com/ProfFrancesca)[University of Exeter](https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/staff/stavrakopoulou/) Related thinkers [ Women & Atheism Female voices in freethought ](/women-and-atheism)[ Richard Dawkins Evolutionary biologist & atheist ](/people/richard-dawkins)[ Susan Blackmore Psychologist & writer ](/people/susan-blackmore) Continue exploring [ The Bible What the Bible actually is — text, history, and authorship. ](/bible)[ Biblical inerrancy The claim her scholarship most directly refutes — that the Bible is without error. ](/biblical-inerrancy)[ Did Jesus exist? The historical-Jesus question, in the same critical register. ](/did-jesus-exist)[ Women and atheism More female freethinkers shaping the conversation. ](/women-and-atheism) ## Sources cited - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55554434-god - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2330717.King_Manasseh_and_Child_Sacrifice - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9577014-land-of-our-fathers - https://x.com/ProfFrancesca - https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/staff/stavrakopoulou/ --- _Canonical HTML version: https://opendoubt.com/people/francesca-stavrakopoulou_