Christians insist that love stands at the heart of who God is. Yet, when we talk about love in the Hebrew Bible, how much do we really know?

Possessing such a belief alone does not mean that we possess a clear understanding of what love is. Are we aware of how often divine and human love are tied up with the idea of preference for one individual or group over another? Do we know how often descriptions of love involve questions of power, authority, and gender? Do we see that love is connected to suffering, betrayal, and sometimes death in the Hebrew Scriptures? In Love in the Hebrew Bible, one of the first book-length studies of its kind, Suzie Park provides fascinating and essential insights into these questions, refreshing our understanding of the meaning of love in the Hebrew Bible. Pushing against characterizations of the loving God of the New Testament narrative universe versus the wrathful God of the Old Testament, Park shows that love is integral to the ways in which relationships, both among people and also between humanity and God, are imagined in the Hebrew text. Reflecting matrices of meaning and associations, love thus is a vital component of the ideology and theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, and an understanding of it remains fundamental to our knowledge of the biblical text.

Song-Mi Suzie Park is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Focusing on literary readings and interpretations of the Bible, with a particular interest in issues of identity and gender, she is the author of Hezekiah and the Dialogue of Memory and 2 Kings in the Wisdom Commentary Series and coauthor with Carolyn B. Helsel of The Flawed Family of God: Stories about the Imperfect Families in Genesis, as well as several articles and essays.