Ancient Egyptian deities purposes. Egyptian texts often refer to deities' true, underlying forms as "mysterious". The Egyptians' visual representations of their gods are therefore not literal. They symbolize specific aspects of each deity's character, functioning much like the ideograms in hieroglyphic writing. For this reason, the funerary god Anubis is commonly shown in Egyptian art as a dog or jackal, a creature whose scavenging habits threaten the preservation of buried mummies, in an effort to counter this threat and employ it for protection. His black coloring alludes to the color of mummified flesh and to the fertile black soil that Egyptians saw as
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,