Understanding the dynamics that gave rise to monotheism in ancient Israel is a hardy perennial in the garden of Hebrew Bible scholarship. Even if it suffers a period of dormancy, it soon returns with renewed vigor. An intense flowering of interest began in the 1980s, but in the last decade or so there have been fewer blooms. Schaper's latest book seeks to reenergize the debate around the origins of monotheism by arguing that a new constellation of media—writing, images, and money—led to an intellectual transformation that resulted in the birth of monotheism. “We posit that Judahite society experienced a crisis of its signification systems, out of which arose a new, more ‘abstract’ conceptualization of the human and divine ‘spheres’ and their mutual interaction, a new way of ‘producing’ divine ‘presence’” (2). It is an important contribution to the discussion, offering an impassioned appeal for the significance of Israel's material culture and the intellectual consequences that stemmed from it. However, to describe this volume as just another contribution to the debate about monotheism's origins is to do it an injustice. Schaper's ambitions are far more wide-ranging. His argument touches on the shift from presence to meaning, the origins of the individual subject, and the emergence and consequences of abstraction. His historical canvas stretches from the origins of writing in the fourth millennium to the classical world; his interlocutors include social anthropologists, philosophers, historians, and literary theorists (e.g., Goody, Cassirer, Derrida). As a result, it is impossible to do justice in a review to the range of issues that this important book addresses.

In the first chapter Schaper sets out some of his key theoretical perspectives and issues of definition (1–54). The rise of monotheism is to be understood in context of the transformation of human societies that stemmed from writing, and in particular, alphabetic writing. Alphabetic writing focused on the textual and marginalized the visual and numeric. This was to have consequences for how the deity was understood to be made “present” through words and images. This “word-image dialectic” is the central diagnostic feature that emerges from this discussion and will guide Schaper's examination of the biblical material. The rising importance of writing from the eighth century BCE also led to a dissatisfaction with making the divine present through images; this aniconism itself led to monotheism. The shift was one from presence to representation.

The second chapter forms the great bulk of the book and examines the “word-image dialectic” first in the prophets and then in the Hexateuch (55–182). This allow Schaper to tackle the material in roughly historical order, but also to move from anti-idol polemics to an emphasis on the written word. Among other things, Schaper offers one of the most detailed analyses of the theme of writing in the Hebrew Bible. At times, however, the “word-image dialectic” seemed a rather artificial framework imposed on the texts, and the use of this as a heuristic framework was determined by the importance of Deuteronomy 4 for Schaper's argument. In this biblical chapter the contrast between seeing and hearing is thematized and ends in one of the outstanding statements of biblical monotheism (4:39), and it forms the lengthiest of Schaper's textual discussions. For him, it is the archetypal expression of Israelite monotheism. “The new conceptualisation of reality propagated by Deuteronomy 4 and similar texts was made possible by the use of alphabetic writing. It was, like other forms of writing, able to conjure up the illusion of presence in its emulation of spoken language. But alphabetic writing, as opposed to other writing systems, was the first technology fully able to dissociate the signifier from the signified, the symbol from the reality it was supposed to symbolize” (159).

The third chapter on money is significantly slighter than that on writing (183–210). Indeed, the only biblical text that is discussed in detail is Deuteronomy's prescriptions for the tithe in 14:22–27 and primarily for the purpose of showing that the idea of monetary equivalence was around no later than the late pre-exilic period. It may well be the case that money had an important role in the emergence of abstraction and individuation, but these ideas are drawn from the theory that Schaper utilizes rather than from the biblical texts he examines. Altogether, this chapter felt something of an afterthought; this impression was strengthened when references to the media of writing referred to Schaper's previously published essays rather than the discussion a chapter earlier.

In the final chapters (211–239), Schaper discusses a number of questions arising from modern writers about monotheism's emergence in ancient Israel. Is it, as Freud would have it, “a progress in intellectuality,” and in what sense? Is Israelite monotheism a product of the so-called “Axial age”?

Given the many intellectual theories that Schaper engages with, it is helpful that he has made significant efforts to digest and communicate these to his readers, though in other places the book's learning sits heavily. Since there is so much to provoke and stimulate in this volume, it is a shame that it will only be accessible to the most advanced students. In the course of the volume Schaper discusses so many biblical texts, and thus it is not surprising that there were times I found myself disagreeing. Occasionally, however, I found my eyebrows rising. I am not sure I would use Judges 17–18 to argue for the nature of pre-exilic image worship: not only is it part of the late framework to Judges, but its idol language echoes the Pentateuch. The proposal that Isaiah 40 only opposes human fabricated images and would view humans as the divine image seems rather too quickly to harmonize with Genesis 1. It was not the only time that I worried Schaper's exegesis was too harmonistic. Few would agree with Schaper that Deuteronomy has “a concept of creation through the word” (231), an idea driven by his belief that the correlation of creation theology with anti-idol polemics was the essential soil from which monotheism sprang. I am similarly skeptical of his claim that the Sinai tradition was the forerunner and basis of the Exodus tradition (117). And it simply is not true that Ezekiel 18 advocates individual responsibility, an idea decisively refuted in scholarship (107). The latter example is consistent with Schaper's claim that a new conception of the self emerged together with monotheism (176). To my mind, both proposals read later developments back onto the biblical text. The same is also true when Schaper insists that the “word” ensures that anyone anywhere could experience the divine in contrast to the restriction of images to the priesthood (135). It felt rather more like the polemics of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century CE Europe than sixth- and fifth-century BCE Israel.