Hephaestus make love to Athena: at the moment of climax she pushes him aside, and his semen falls to the earth where it impregnates Gaia." Hephaestus was associated by Greek colonists in southern Italy with the volcano gods Adranus (of Mount Etna) and Vulcanus of the Lipari islands. The first-century sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have observed, "there are many other mountains all over the earth that are on fire, and yet we should never be done with it if we assigned to them giants and gods like Hephaestus". In the Trojan war, Hephaestus sided with the Greeks, but
The Suffering of God describes what he calls, the “intensification of the divine presence.” This intensity of presence can be affected positively or negatively by human beings. Fretheim argues that sin drives away God (as in Ezekiel 8:6) and actually results in the intensification of divine presence in the form of God's wrath. Conversely, righteousness or “receptiveness” can move God to draw near. The most intense experience of God's presence occurs in the form of theophany. In what is probably Fretheim's most controversial chapter (chapter 6), he describes the appearances of God in the Old Testament and the human reaction to them. To Fretheim,