In Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World, Mark Smith addresses multiple levels of relationship between place and divinity in the Hebrew Bible. The book is divided into three parts, each exploring various dimensions of divine anthropomorphism in social, cultic, and political contexts. Smith highlights the overlap of human and divine elements that both constitute and mediate the lived religious experiences of individuals in the biblical world. He accomplishes this in part through investigations of cognate Near Eastern literatures and iconographic data wherein his chief conversation partners are the Ugaritic texts of which he has become a revered translator and interpreter.

Smith introduces a typology of divine bodies based on representational differences in size, scale, and spheres of interaction. Accordingly, anthropomorphic representations of God in the Hebrew Bible fall into three categories: God's human-sized “natural” body, God's temple-sized “superhuman” body, and God's “cosmic” body of heavenly proportions. Each of these somatic entities is variously located and interacts with humans within a spatial matrix constituted by material/immaterial, prosaic/numinous, and earthly/heavenly quantities. With this interpretive baseline of relational measurements established, Smith explores physical and textual instances of home, cultic, and urban spaces displaying the spectrum of anthropomorphic representations. He maintains that the spaces of temples and cities analogically impart information about divine characteristics while serving as representations of the limits of congruence between humans and deities. Where the Gods Are also makes substantive contributions to discussions of theriomorphic and physiomorphic representations of the divine. The book's most astute insights come in the fifth chapter, where Smith draws on Near Eastern linguistic data to explicate the multiple manifestations of divinity across urban spaces.

Smith presents West-Semitic, Israelite, and Mesopotamian conceptions of divinity through richly textured commentary. He returns frequently to the analogy of a kaleidoscope in order to name the composite and convergent nature of human conceptualizations of the divine. Throughout, Smith's assertion is that several elements of the anthropomorphic representations of divinity in the Bible are intrinsic to Levantine religious worldviews, while others are derived from external spheres of influence. He argues that God's “natural” and “superhuman” bodies are traditional conceptions of deity endemic to Levantine contexts. Those anthropomorphic depictions of divinity that fall into the “cosmic” category likely originate in the biblical authors’ interactions with Mesopotamian cosmology during exilic and postexilic periods. Smith successfully works against constructing a progressivist chronological paradigm of shifting anthropomorphic representations by foregrounding the complex interrelationship of the various biblical sources responsible for specific anthropomorphic conceptions. Thus, readers find Smith employing familiar categories like Priestly, Deuteronomic, and the more nebulous non-Priestly to describe the authorial springs from which the spectrum of anthropomorphic representations arise. Smith interprets intersecting trajectories of diverse divine imagery by drawing on his previous work that engages the convergence and translation of divinity in cross-cultural contexts.

Like other books in the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library series, Where the Gods Are provides a topical introduction appropriate for both lay and scholarly audiences. Smith has analyzed a well-known data set in a novel way. The work, however, is not as “boldly original” as its dust jacket proclaims. The fact that much of the book's content is present in other essays authored by Smith makes the steep shelf price difficult to pay and the book generally prohibitive for assignment as a supplementary text in classrooms. Where the Gods Are successfully highlights the tensions between human and divine elements of anthropomorphism—with one note of caution. Readers wanting exemplary models for applying concepts of critical spatial theory to biblical studies should look elsewhere, as the reviewer is concerned that Smith's methodology reveals a confusion of fundamental critical spatial categories. Smith's work will likely whet the appetite of readers to explore more extensive treatments of the particular areas of sacred and profane spatiality by other authors, and is best read in tandem with such works. Smith himself adeptly guides readers to such sources in his extensive endnotes.