A trial lawyer by trade, a Christian by heart - author Mark Lanier has trained in biblical languages and devoted his life to studying and living the Bible. Living daily with the demands of his career and the desire for a godly life, Lanier recognizes the importance and challenge of finding daily time to spend in God's Word. His study of the first five books of the Bible - the Torah, the Law - has brought Life to his life. In Torah for Living, Lanier shares a year's worth of devotionals - one for each day of the year. In each devotional, Lanier reflects on the biblical text, relates the text to the struggles facing faithful readers of the Bible, and concludes with a prayer for the day.

The Bhagavata Purana is one of the most important, central and popular scriptures of Hinduism. A medieval Sanskrit text, its influence as a religious book has been comparable only to that of the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Ithamar Theodor here offers the first analysis for twenty years of the Bhagavata Purana (often called the Fifth Veda ) and its different layers of meaning. He addresses its lyrical meditations on the activities of Krishna (avatar of Lord Vishnu), the central place it affords to the doctrine of bhakti (religious devotion) and its treatment of older Vedic traditions of knowledge. At the same time he places this subtle, poetical book within the context of the wider Hindu scriptures and the other Puranas, including the similar but less grand and significant Vishnu Purana. The author argues that the Bhagavata Purana is a unique work which represents the meeting place of two great orthodox Hindu traditions, the Vedic-Upanishadic and the Aesthetic. As such, it is one of India s greatest theological treatises. This book illuminates its character and continuing significance."

Rumi's great book of wisdom-infused poetry contain myriad lessons on the importance of faith, with the culture and lessons of spiritual, Biblical and Islamic teachings featuring strongly. In authoring his masterwork, Rumi quoted the Qu'ran, the Bible and several spiritual forebears. Wishing to align his poetry in order to tell tales of man and man's place in the world, Rumi drew upon a variety of religious and spiritual sources to create a poetic compendium of supreme profundity and depth. The Masnavi was praised as one of the finest works of mystical literature ever seen. It is in the Masnavi that Persia's place between the spiritual cultures of Asia and the Middle East is evidenced. Rumi himself, while undoubtedly an Islamic scholar of great ability, did not feel confined to the faith; he saw spiritual value in a range of disciplines, and asserted that the light of Mohammed's prophecy does not leave faithful Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians or other denominations behind.

Night of Beginnings is a groundbreaking new haggadah for the Passover seder from acclaimed poet, translator, and liturgist Marcia Falk, beautifully designed and illustrated with original color drawings by the author. Unlike both traditional and new haggadahs, which do not contain a full recounting of the biblical story, Night of Beginnings presents the Exodus narrative in its entirety, providing a direct connection to the ancient origins of the holiday. This retelling highlights the actions of its female characters, including Moshe's sister, Miriam; Pharaoh's daughter, who adopts the baby Moshe; and the midwives Shifrah and Pu'ah, who save the Hebrew male infants. Falk's revolutionary new blessings, in Hebrew and English, replace the traditional, patriarchal seder blessings, and her kavanot-meditative directions for prayer-introduce a genre new to the seder ritual. Poems, psalms, and songs are arranged to give structural coherence to the haggadah. A new commentary raises interpretive questions and invites us to bring personal reflections into the discussion. Like the author's widely acclaimed previous prayer books, The Book of Blessings and The Days Between, Falk's poetic blessings for the seder envision the divine as a Greater Whole of which we are an inseparable part. The inclusive language of Falk's blessings makes room for women to find and use their voices more full-throatedly than they were able to do with the male-centered prayers inherited from the early rabbis. Men, too, will encounter here a spiritually moving and thought-provoking experience.

How it is possible that the story about Elisha's succession in 2 Kings 2:1-18 is now remembered as the story about Elijah's ascent? The intertextual answer is provided by the contrast between the number of references about the human heavenly ascension in the Hebrew Bible, and the popularity of this theme in the Ancient Near East. However, in this dissertation we focus on the more direct intratextual approach. We analyze the construction of the narrative in order to discern the features of style, structure, and symbolism which emphasize Elijah's ascent, rather than Elisha's succession. As a result, we can identify the proto-symbol of the narrative (Gilgal) which is interpreted by three elements (whirlwind, chariotry, and rolled mantle) referring to Elijah's ascent.

Through extensive textual analysis, this open access book reveals how various passages of the Qur'an define death and resurrection spiritually or metaphorically. While the Day of Resurrection is a major theme of the Qur'an, resurrection has largely been interpreted as physical, which is defined as bones leaving their graves. However, this book shows that the Qur'an sometimes alludes to death and resurrection in a metaphoric manner - for example, rebuilding a desolate town, typically identified as Jerusalem, and bringing the Israelite exiles back; thus, suggesting awareness and engagement with Jewish liturgy. Many times, the Qur'an even speaks of non-believers as spiritually dead, those who live in this world, but are otherwise zombies. The author presents an innovative theory of interpretation, contextualizing the Qur'an within Late Antiquity and traces the Qur'anic passages back to their Biblical, extra-biblical and rabbinic subtexts and traditions. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed a world of early Jewish writing larger than the Bible, from multiple versions of biblical texts to "revealed" books not found in our canon. Despite this diversity, the way we read Second Temple Jewish literature remains constrained by two anachronistic categories: a theological one, "Bible," and a bibliographic one, "book." The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity suggests ways of thinking about how Jews understood their own literature before these categories had emerged. Using familiar sources such as the Psalms, Ben Sira, and Jubilees, Mroczek tells an unfamiliar story about sacred writing not bound in a Bible. In many texts, we see an awareness of a vast tradition of divine writing found in multiple locations only partially revealed in available scribal collections. Ancient heroes like David are not simply imagined as scriptural authors, but multi-dimensional characters who come to be known as great writers and honored as founders of growing textual traditions. Scribes recognize the divine origin of texts like the Enoch literature and other writings revealed to ancient patriarchs, which present themselves not as derivative of material we now call biblical, but prior to it. Sacred writing stretches back to the dawn of time, yet new discoveries are always around the corner. While listening to the way ancient writers describe their own literature-their own metaphors and narratives about writing-this book also argues for greater suppleness in our own scholarly imagination, no longer bound by modern canonical and bibliographic assumptions.