... In 1999 Eryl Davies published an article on the imitation of God. He too begins from Leviticus 19:2, but augments this with other verses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, rather as I have already indicated, arguing that the activity of God manifested, for example, in the exodus, provides a ‘blueprint or paradigm’ for human response. A new feature in Davies’s treatment is an interesting reference to Psalms 111 and 112 which commentators have long suspected are a more than random pairing: in Zimmerli’s words, quoted by Davies, ‘the characteristics of the pious [in Psalm 112] mirror those of God himself [in Psalm 111]’. Davies, like others who have written on this subject, is unable to point to very many explicit commands to imitate God, but contends that a certain parallelism between God and human beings is somehow the underlying presupposition of much in Old Testament ethics. The sense of affinity between God and humanity upon which it depends is seen as a central assertion of the Old Testament, and perhaps as a distinctive feature in ancient Israel as against the environing cultures ...