Supreme, Ancestral, and Personal Gods

In this chapter I consider special issues and categories: the meaning of gods said to be ‘of ‘ an individual, a form of expression found both in Anatolia and Syria, though not Greece, and perhaps having distinct origins in the two cases; the closest Greek equivalents to such gods ‘of’ an individual, namely his ‘ancestral’ gods, and the development which the concept of ancestral god underwent outside Greece; the forms of expression used to name a top god; the place of deities such as ‘the divine’ and ‘angels’ in a divine hierarchy. I enter the controversy about ‘Highest God’, siding with those who deny that this is a distinct new cult but emphasising the interest of the ‘anonymisation’ of that title.