 Feuerbach’s book, Theogony according to the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity (1857), is the product of six years of close engagement with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts from antiquity, and exemplifies the vastness of Feuerbach’s humanistic erudition. Feuerbach considered it his “simplest, most complete, mature work” (GW 20: 292). It may not be a mere coincidence that the period of Feuerbach’s engagement in these philological labors was the same period when one of his closest correspondents was Emil Ernst Gottfried von Herder, the son of Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose introduction to the study of theology Feuerbach had read as a young man while he himself was learning Hebrew grammar in preparation for his matriculation in the theological faculty at the University of Heidelberg. Like the older Herder, who conceived of the poetry of the Hebrew Bible as a product of the genius of humanity in its childhood, Feuerbach turned to the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he thought of as the Urstätten or “original sites” of anthropology, and to the Hebrew scriptures, for clues to the origins of belief in the gods and in God. Large portions of the book consist either of 1) careful philological analyses of individual passages selected, for example, from the Iliad or the Odyssey, or from the creation accounts in Genesis, or else of a verse from Pindar or Ovid, or a passage from the New Testament; or 2) quotations from a wide range of Greco-Roman, patristic, rabbinical and medieval sources which Feuerbach cites as evidence to support the central explanatory claim of the book. This claim is that the psychological origin of belief in the gods and in God is the powerful human wish for happiness or blessedness conceived as a state of freedom from the “limitations” (Grenze) that nature imposes on human existence, which are experienced by the human subject in the form of powerful feelings of hope and fear.