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Photo by Sonia Halliday and Laura Lushington

ON THE COVER: God bequeaths “all the land of Canaan” to Abraham and his offspring “as an everlasting holding” (Genesis 17:8), in this 15th-century stained-glass window from the Great Malvern Priory Church in Worcestershire, England. But God earlier promised Abraham and his descendants a far vaster tract, extending from the Euphrates to the Egyptian border. In his deliberately provocative “Yahweh & Abraham—A Case of Male Bonding,” Philip Davies characterizes the negotiations between the sly deity, who keeps changing his terms, and the wealthy Abraham as those of two males playing a game of poker—each enjoying the competition as he tries to get as much as he can out of the other.