As regards the major issue of the "Son of God" in Christianity, Idel contends that, until recently, "sonship" has unsuccessfully been connected only to Christian or Christian-related sources: "the concept of the Son of God is not necessarily a Christological one in Jewish mystical literatures" (p.
Regarding perhaps the most interesting aspect of post-biblical Judaism as related to sonship, which is considered to be the rising impact of median entities, Idel contends that, in certain circumstances, the two vectors concur.
58, 63), so the reader could freely acknowledge the plethora of intricate theoretical variants of "sonship" extant in the various texts themselves, variants which are no longer (euphemistically) collectable under a stalemated single name as "Christian tradition" or "Jewish tradition." In this reading, the hard nuclei of doctrinal differences become obsolete.
The topic and the method of the book being thoroughly established, the author proceeds by illustrating with passages from the Hebrew Bible, tracking back the concept of "sonship" as developed under a largely theophanic vector (Exod.