The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud

Philosophers have often described theism as the belief in the existence of a “perfect being”―a being that is said to possess all possible perfections, so that it is all-powerful, all-knowing, immutable, perfectly good, perfectly simple, and necessarily existent, among other qualities. But such a theology is difficult to reconcile with the God we find in the Bible and Talmud. The Question of God’s Perfection brings together leading scholars from the Jewish and Christian traditions to critically examine the theology of perfect being in light of the Hebrew Bible and classical rabbinic sources. Contributors are James A. Diamond, Lenn E. Goodman, Edward C. Halper, Yoram Hazony, Dru Johnson, Brian Leftow, Berel Dov Lerner, Alan L. Mittleman, Heather C. Ohaneson, Randy Ramal, Eleonore Stump, Alex Sztuden, and Joshua I. Weinstein.

Yoram Hazony is President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem. His books include The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge, 2012), God and Politics in Esther (Cambridge, 2016), and The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018).
Dru Johnson is an Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological studies at The King’s College in New York City, co-founder/chair of the Hebrew Bible and Philosophy program unit in the Society of Biblical Literature (2014–16), and editor for the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Biblical Criticism series. His recent books include Epistemology and Biblical Theology (Routledge, 2018), Knowledge by Ritual (Eisenbrauns, 2016), and Human Rites (Eerdmans, 2018).