1997 was the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls explores the evidence about calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish texts. James C. VanderKam examines the pertinent texts, their sources and the different uses to which people put calendrical information in the Christian world.
Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls provides a valuable addition to the Dead Sea Scrolls Series and contributes to the elucidation of the scroll texts themselves and their relation to other Biblical texts.

Addressed to Jews and non-Jews alike, though aware that these two reader groups were likelyn to approach the book with very different presuppositions, Daiches sets out to define Judaism in relation to philosophy, to explain Kant's philosophy through the superiority of halakhah, defend a biblically based Jewish interpretation of history, and champion Judaism as a religion of freedom guaranteed by halakhah (Jewish law).

Popol Vuh, the Quiché Mayan book of creation, is not only the most important text in the native languages of the Americas, it is also an extraordinary document of the human imagination. It begins with the deeds of Mayan gods in the darkness of a primeval sea and ends with the radiant splendor of the Mayan lords who founded the Quiché kingdom in the Guatemalan highlands. Originally written in Mayan hieroglyphs, it was transcribed into the Roman alphabet in the sixteenth century.

This new edition of Dennis Tedlock's unabridged, widely praised translation includes new notes and commentary, newly translated passages, newly deciphered hieroglyphs, and over forty new illustrations.

Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi-a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years-Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience. An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of Jewish literature and history, he came to realize that he couldn't fully explore these subjects without some knowledge of the Talmud. This book is perfect for readers who are in a similar position. Most people have little sense of what the Talmud actually is-how the text moves, its preoccupations and insights, and its moments of strangeness and profundity. As a critic and journalist Kirsch has experience in exploring difficult texts, discussing what he finds there, and why it matters. His exploration into the Talmud is best described as a kind of travel writing-a report on what he saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud. For readers who want to travel that same path, there is no better guide.

The "Bhagavad Gita" is a sacred scripture of epic dimensions and is the key sacred text of Hinduism. It means the "song of God" and is often called the "Song Celestial". Alan Jacobs uses contemporary free verse based on innovative metaphors to provide a clear meaning for today's readers. It is mandala poetry - each verse being a mandala for meditation.

Within the broad Hindu religious tradition, there have been for millennia many subtraditions generically called Vaisnava, who insist that the most appropriate mode of religious faith and experience is bhakti, or devotion, to the supreme personal deity, Visnu. Caitanya Vaisnavas are a community of Vaisnava devotees who coalesced around Krsna Caitanya (1486-1533), who taught devotion to the name and form of Krsna, especially in conjunction with his divine consort Radha and who also came to be looked upon by many as Krsna himself who had graciously chosen to be born in Bengal to exemplify the ideal mode of loving devotion (prema-bhakti). This book focusses on the relationship between the 'transcendent' intentionality of religious faith of human beings and their 'mundane' socio-cultural ways of living, through a detailed study of the social implications of the Caitanya Vaisnava devotional Hindu tradition in pre-colonial and colonial Bengal. Structured in two parts, the first analyzes the articulation of Krsna-bhakti within the broad Hindu sector of Bengali society. The second section examines Hindu-Muslim relationships in Bengal from the particular vantage point of the Caitanya Vaisnava tradition, and in which the subtle influence of Krsna-bhakti, it is argued, may be detected. In both sections, the bulk of attention is given to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Bengal was under independent Sultanate or emergent Mughal rule and thus free of the impact of British and European colonial influence. Arguing that the Caitanya Vaisnava devotion contributed to the softening of the potentially alienating socio-cultural divisions of class, caste, sect and religio-political community in Bengal, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian Religion and Hinduism, in particular devotional Hinduism, both premodern and modern, as well as to scholars and students of South Asian social history, Hindu-Muslim relations, and Bengali religious culture.

Addressed to Jews and non-Jews alike, though aware that these two reader groups were likelyn to approach the book with very different presuppositions, Daiches sets out to define Judaism in relation to philosophy, to explain Kant's philosophy through the superiority of halakhah, defend a biblically based Jewish interpretation of history, and champion Judaism as a religion of freedom guaranteed by halakhah (Jewish law).

The Steinsaltz Talmud is the most accessible edition available of the Talmud, the nearly 2,000-year-old, central text of the Jewish people. Translated from the Aramaic to modern Hebrew, with explanations and commentary by one of the great Talmud scholars of all time, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, The Steinsaltz Talmud fosters deep and creative engagement with the text. The Steinsaltz Talmud offers solutions to linguistic and contextual issues in the text, removes obstacles stemming from the its non-linear construction, and provides succinct commentaries, pertinent Halachic rulings, explanatory notes to Rashi and other commentators, detailed indexes, and background from the sciences, history and the humanities.The Steinsaltz Talmud enables both beginning and seasoned students to participate in the living Talmudic conversation.

Dhammapada means "the path of dharma," the path of truth, harmony, and righteousness that anyone can follow to reach the highest good. Easwaran's translation of this classic Buddhist text is the best-selling edition in its field, praised by Huston Smith as a "sublime rendering." The introduction gives an overview of the Buddha's teachings that is penetrating and clear - accessible for readers new to Buddhism, but also with fresh insights and practical applications for readers familiar with this text. Chapter introductions place individual verses into the context of the broader Buddhist canon. Easwaran is a master storyteller, and his opening essay includes many stories that make moving, memorable reading, bringing young Siddhartha and his heroic spiritual quest vividly to life. But Easwaran's main qualification for interpreting the Dhammapada, he said, was that he knew from his own experience that these verses could transform our lives. This faithful rendition brings us closer to the compassionate heart of the Buddha.

The wisdom of Buddhism is to be found in its Scriptures, and this book attempts to compile a selection from Buddhist writings. The Scriptures used by the Zen School of China and Japan are well represented, and chapters discuss such topics as the Buddha, Tibetan Buddhism, concentration and meditation, the Buddhist order, and Nirvana. In this anthology, the source of each item is given, whilst a glossary and index have been added.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of 972 documents discovered between 1946 and 1956, are of immeasurable religious and historical significance. They include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical-era documents. The manuscripts shed considerable light on forms of Judaism never known before. These forms contain hints of Christianity, or as put elsewhere, it was the Judaism amid which Christ and his first followers lived, thought, and wrote. Edmund Wilson's book is a record of this great scholarly find.Wilson was a prolific literary critic and social commentator, not an academic, and therefore Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls reads like a journalist's reportage. This unique personal account weaves together threads of folklore, history, and intrigue. As Leon Edel writes in his foreword, 'Reading him, it is not difficult to imagine the ardor with which Edmund Wilson pursued his complex subject; it was the kind of subject he had always liked best, involving as it did history, politics, ancient lore, and all his faculties for imaginative reconstruction and historical analysis. . . . No book quite like this has been written in our century.'The scrolls of the Essenes, and the history of this Jewish sect's possible antecedence to Christianity, led the author to Israel and to the revelations contained in the scrolls. This book contains his resulting account of the scrolls' history. Originally published in 1978, this edition of Wilson's classic is made contemporary with a new introduction by Raphael Israeli, which illustrates the ongoing academic controversy surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Jung's interest in the East was deep-rooted and life-long, and the traditional teachings of China and India played an important role in his personal and intellectual development, as well as in the formations of the ideas and practices that are central to Jungian psychology.
Jung on the East brings together key selections from his work on Buddhism, yoga and Taoism, and on such classic texts as the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It also includes accounts on his own journey to India.
The clear and perceptive introduction sets the context for Jung's encounter with the East, and provides an excellent framework that will enable the reader to get the most out of Jung's writings in this area. The book will be of interest to everyone seeking to further their understanding both of Jung, and of Eastern thought and spirituality.

The Gandharan birch-bark scrolls preserve the earliest remains of Buddhist literature known today and provide unprecedented insights into the history of Buddhism. This volume presents three manuscripts from the Bajaur Collection (BC), a group of nineteen scrolls discovered at the end of the twentieth century and named after their findspot in northwestern Pakistan. The manuscripts, written in the Gandhari language and Kharosthi script, date to the second century CE. The three scrolls-BC 4, BC 6, and BC 11-contain treatises that focus on the Buddhist concept of non-attachment. This volume is the first in the Gandharan Buddhist Texts series that is devoted to texts belonging to the Mahayana tradition. There are no known versions of these texts in other Buddhist traditions, and it is assumed that they are autographs. Andrea Schlosser provides an overview of the contents of the manuscripts and discusses their context, genre, possible authorship, physical layout, paleography, orthography, phonology, and morphology. Transliteration and translation of the texts are accompanied by notes on difficult terminology, photographs of the reconstructed scrolls, an index of Gandhari words with Sanskrit and Pali equivalents, and a preliminary transliteration of the scroll BC 19. The ebook edition of Three Early Mahayana Treatises of Gandhara is openly available at DOI 10.6069/9780295750750.

'The Zohar' was compiled and composed in Spain in the thirteenth century, and exerted a powerful influence on Jewish life in medieval ghettoes. In this book, first published in 1932, Dr Bension was the first scholar to deal with the influence on Jewish mysticism of certain characteristics which underlie so much of the literature produced in Spain both by Christians and Muslims.

Reading the Sacred Scriptures: From Oral Tradition to Written Documents and their Reception examines how the scriptures came to be written and how their authority has been constructed and reinforced over time. Highlighting the measures taken to safeguard the stability of oral accounts, this book demonstrates the care of religious communities to maintain with reverence their assembled parchments and scrolls. Written by leading experts in their fields, this collection chronicles the development of the scriptures from oral tradition to written documents and their reception. It features notable essays on the scriptures of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Shinto, and Baha'i. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the belief systems of the featured religions. It offers an ideal starting point from which undergraduate and postgraduate religious studies students, teachers and lecturers can explore religious traditions from their historical beginnings.

Reading the Sacred Scriptures: From Oral Tradition to Written Documents and their Reception examines how the scriptures came to be written and how their authority has been constructed and reinforced over time. Highlighting the measures taken to safeguard the stability of oral accounts, this book demonstrates the care of religious communities to maintain with reverence their assembled parchments and scrolls. Written by leading experts in their fields, this collection chronicles the development of the scriptures from oral tradition to written documents and their reception. It features notable essays on the scriptures of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Shinto, and Baha'i. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the belief systems of the featured religions. It offers an ideal starting point from which undergraduate and postgraduate religious studies students, teachers and lecturers can explore religious traditions from their historical beginnings.

The Ramayana of Valmiki is considered by many contemporary Hindus to be a foundational religious text. But this understanding is in part the result of a transformation of the epic's receptive history, a hermeneutic project which challenged one characterization of the genre of the text, as a work of literary culture, and replaced it with another, as a work of remembered tradition. This book examines Ramayana commentaries, poetic retellings, and praise-poems produced by intellectuals within the Srivaisnava order of South India from 1250 to 1600 and shows how these intellectuals reconceptualized Rama's story through the lens of their devotional metaphysics. Srivaisnavas applied innovative interpretive techniques to the Ramayana, including allegorical reading, slesa reading (reading a verse as a double entendre), and the application of vernacular performance techniques such as word play, improvisation, repetition, and novel forms of citation. The book is of interest not only to Ramayana specialists but also to those engaged with Indian intellectual history, literary studies, and the history of religions.

The Ramayana, an ancient epic of India, with audiences across vast stretches of time and geography, continues to influence numberless readers socially and morally through its many re-tellings. Made available in English for the first time, the 16th century version presented here is by Candravati, a woman poet from Bengal. It is a highly individual rendition as a tale told from a woman's point of view which, instead of celebrating masculine heroism, laments the suffering of women caught in the play of male ego. This book presents a translation and commentary on the text, with an extensive introduction that scrutinizes its social and cultural context and correlates its literary identity with its ideological implications. Taken together, the narrative and the critical study offered here expand the understanding both of the history of women's self-expression in India and the cultural potency of the epic tale. The book is of interest equally to students and researchers of South Asian narratives, Ramayana studies and gender issues.

As stated in the introduction, two of the three texts translated in this book focus on the contents of Islamic faith, while the third concentrates on the details of practice--that is, the works that Muslims should perform in order to observe the Shariah.

The first volume of a world-renowned scholar's long-awaited Qur'an commentary, now available in English Angelika Neuwirth's six-volume commentary, published originally in Germany, offers a historical and philological analysis of the form, structure, and semantic message of each of the 114 Qur'anic suras. It brings together the fruits of the past hundred years of modern scholarship and provides access to the aesthetic, theological, linguistic, and semantic background required to appreciate the unique novelty, force, and historical position of the Qur'an. Contextualizing the Qur'anic message in the broader world of late antiquity, it bridges the gaps between the inner-Islamic scholarly world and the academy. Skillfully translated by Samuel Wilder, this first volume focuses on the Meccan suras, the earliest and often the most aesthetically striking and compelling part of the corpus of Qur'anic proclamations.

First published in 1909, this book presents an English translation of chapters 25-42 of the Bhishma Parva from the epic Sanskrit poem Mahabharata - better known as the Bhagavad-Gita, reckoned as one of the "Five Jewels" of Devanagari literature. The plot consists of a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Krishna, the Supreme Deity, in a war-chariot prior to a great battle. The conversation that takes place unfolds a philosophical system which remains the prevailing Brahmanic belief, blending the doctrines of Kapila, Patanjali, and the Vedas. Building on a number of preceding translations, this highly-regarded poetic interpretation provides a major work of literature in an accessible popular form.

Transforming Literature into Scripture examines how the early textual traditions of ancient Israel - stories, laws, and rituals - were transformed into sacred writings. By comparing evidence from two key collections from antiquity - the royal library at Nineveh and the biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls - the book traces the stabilisation of textual traditions in the ancient Near East towards fixed literary prototypes. The study presents a new methodology which enables the quantification, categorisation and statistical analysis of texts from different languages, writing systems, and media. The methodology is tested on wide range of text genres from the cuneiform and biblical traditions in order to determine which texts tend towards stabilised forms. Transforming Literature into Scripture reveals how authoritative literary collections metamorphosed into fixed ritualised texts and will be of interest to scholars across Biblical, Judaic and Literary Studies.

Collection of major references to women in the Quran and Hadiths, the two central Pillars of Islam on which Islamic legislation and social practice are based. Topics covered include Hygiene, Divorce, Marriage, Sex and Chastity, Inheritance, and Status and Rights.

'The Zohar' was compiled and composed in Spain in the thirteenth century, and exerted a powerful influence on Jewish life in medieval ghettoes. In this book, first published in 1932, Dr Bension was the first scholar to deal with the influence on Jewish mysticism of certain characteristics which underlie so much of the literature produced in Spain both by Christians and Muslims.