This book continues the work of The Qur'an in its Historical Context, in which an international group of scholars address an expanded range of topics on the Qur'an and its origins, looking beyond medieval Islamic traditions to present the Qur'an's own conversation with the religions and literatures of its day. Particular attention is paid to recent debates and controversies in the field, and to uncovering the Qur'an's relationship with Judaism and Christianity. After a foreword by Abdolkarim Soroush, chapters by renowned experts cover: method in Qur'anic Studies analysis of material evidence, including inscriptions and ancient manuscripts, for what they show of the Qur'an's origins the language of the Qur'an and proposed ways to emend our reading of the Qur'an how our knowledge of the religious groups at the time of the Qur'an's emergence might contribute to a better understanding of the text the Qur'an's conversation with Biblical literature and traditions that challenge the standard understanding of the holy book. This debate of recent controversial proposals for new interpretations of the Qur'an will shed new light on the Qur'anic passages that have been shrouded in mystery and debate. As such, it will be a valuable reference for scholars of Islam, the Qur'an, Christian-Muslim relations and the Middle East.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A 2011 NIV Bible bound in tactile brown satchel leather with colourful, Bauhaus-inspired end-papers and magnetic clasp. With over 400 million Bibles in print, the New International Version is the world's most popular modern English Bible. It is renowned for its combination of reliability and readability. Fully revised and updated for the first time in 25 years, the NIV is ideal for personal reading, public teaching and group study. This Bible also features: - clear, readable 6.75pt text - easy-to-read layout - shortcuts to key stories, events and people of the Bible - reading plan - timeline - book by book overview - quick links to find inspiration and help from the Bible in different life situations This edition uses British spelling, punctuation and grammar to allow the Bible to be read more naturally. More about the translation This revised and updated edition of the NIV includes three main types of change, taking into account changes in the way we use language day to day; advances in biblical scholarship and understanding; and the need to ensure that gender accurate language is used, to faithfully reflect whether men and women are referred to in each instance. The translators have carefully assessed a huge body of scholarship, as well as inviting peer submissions, in order to review every word of the existing NIV to ensure it remains as clear and relevant today as when it was first published. Royalties from all sales of the NIV Bible help Biblica in their work of translating and distributing Bibles around the world.

With extraordinary range and literary energy, the story of Absalom's rebellion in 2 Samuel ranks as the most elaborate and extensively narrated internal political event in the Hebrew Bible, complete with a host of scandalous and sordid events: illicit sex, murder, cover-up, petty crime, to name a few. For many students approaching the historical books of the Bible, however, texts often fail to address the vitality of this most turbulent period of King David's career. Bodner addresses this shortcoming with his The Rebellion of Absalom, a lively analysis of the early monarchy of Israel, written by a recognized commentator of the Bible's historical books. Concise and insightful, each chapter incrementally focuses on the stages of David's rise to power and Absalom's early life and rebellion. Crucial issues in the development of Israel's monarchy are embedded in this story, including: royal legitimation divine election succession usurpation divine and human punishment. The Rebellion of Absalom is a student-friendly, culturally savvy approach to one of the most important episodes in deciding how the kings of Israel would be determined throughout the monarchic period.

Focusing on the Avestan and Pahlavi versions of the Sih-rozag, a text worshipping Zoroastrian divine entities, this book explores the spiritual principles and physical realities associated with them. Introducing the book is an overview of the structural, linguistic and historico-religious elements of the Avestan Sih-rozag. This overview, as well as reconstructing its approximate chronology, helps in understanding the original ritual function of the text and its relationship to the other Avestan texts.The book then studies the translation of the text in the Middle Persian language, Pahlavi, which was produced several centuries after its initial composition, when Avestan was no longer understood by the majority of the Zoroastrian community. Addressing the lacuna in literature examining an erstwhile neglected Zoroastrian text, The Sih-Rozag in Zoroastrianism includes a detailed commentary and an English translation of both the Avestan and Pahlavi version of the Sih-rozag and will be of interest to researchers and scholars of Iranian Studies, Religion, and History.

One of the cornerstones of the religious Jewish experience in all its variations is Torah study, and this learning is considered a central criterion for leadership. Jewish Women's Torah Study addresses the question of women's integration in the halachic-religious system at this pivotal intersection. The contemporary debate regarding women's Torah study first emerged in the second half of the 19th century. As women's status in general society changed, offering increased legal rights and opportunities for education, a debate on the need to change women's participation in Torah study emerged. Orthodoxy was faced with the question: which parts, if any, of modernity should be integrated into Halacha? Exemplifying the entire array of Orthodox responses to modernity, this book is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Judaism in the modern era and will be of interest to students and scholars of Religion, Gender Studies and Jewish Studies.

In A Beginner's Guide to The Steinsaltz Talmud, Rabbi Judith Z. Abrams selects a fascinating and provocative section from the Talmud and helps students to reap the vast rewards that can be achieved when one encounters Rabbi Steinsaltz's historic, ground-breaking work. With the publication of The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, it is now possible for the modern reader to study Judaism's great compendium of Jewish law and legend for the first time. The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition is more than just a translation. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz becomes our personal instructor, guiding us through the intricate paths of talmudic logic and thought.

Offering an analysis of Christian-Muslim dialogue across four centuries, this book highlights those voices of ecumenical tone which have more often used the Qur'an for drawing the two faiths together rather than pushing them apart, and amplifies the voice of the Qur'an itself. Finding that there is tremendous ecumenical ground between Christianity and Islam in the voices of their own scholars, this book ranges from a period of declining ecumenism during the first three centuries of Islam, to a period of resurging ecumenism during the most recent century until now. Among the ecumenical voices in the Christian-Muslim dialogue, this book points out that the Qur'an itself is possibly the strongest of those voices. These findings are cause for, and evidence of, hope for the Christian-Muslim relationship: that although agreement may never be reached, dialogue has led at times to very real mutual understanding and appreciation of the religious other. Providing a tool for those pursuing understanding and mutual appreciation between the Islamic and Christian faiths, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Islam, the Qur'an and the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

This book examines the contrasting interpretations of Islam and the Qur'an by Averroes and Al-Ghazali, as a way of helping us untangle current impasses affecting each Abrahamic faith. This has traditionally been portrayed as a battle between philosophy and theology, but the book shows that Averroes was rather more religious and Al-Ghazali more philosophical than they are usually portrayed. The book traces the interaction between two Muslim thinkers, showing how each is convinced of the existence of a Book in which God is revealed to rational beings, to whom He has given commandments, as well as of the excellence of Islamic society. Yet they differ regarding the proper way to interpret the sacred Book. From this point of view, their discussion does not address the contrast between philosophy and religion, or that between reason and revelation that is so characteristic of the Middle Ages, but rather explores differences at the heart of philosophical discussion in our day: is there a level of discourse which will facilitate mutual comprehension among persons, allowing them to engage in debate? This interpretation of sacred texts illustrates the ways religious practice can shape believers' readings of their sacred texts, and how philosophical interpretations can be modified by religious practice. Moreover, since this sort of inquiry characterizes each Abrahamic tradition, this study can be expected to enhance interfaith conversation and explore religious ways to enhance tolerance between other believers.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

Although seldom studied by biblical scholars as a discrete phenomenon, ritual violence is mentioned frequently in biblical texts, and includes ritual actions such as disfigurement of corpses, destruction or scattering of bones removed from a tomb, stoning and other forms of public execution, cursing, forced depilation, the legally-sanctioned imposition of physical defects on living persons, coerced potion-drinking, sacrificial burning of animals and humans, forced stripping and exposure of the genitalia, and mass eradication of populations. This book, the first to focus on ritual violence in the Hebrew Bible, investigates these and other violent rites, the ritual settings in which they occur, their various literary contexts, and the identity and aims of their agents in order to speak in an informed way about the contours and social aspects of ritual violence as it is represented in the Hebrew Bible.

The book applies systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to the comparison of four English translations of the Platform Sutra (1930, 1977, 1998 and 2011) in the field of translation studies. The Platform Sutra is an ancient Chan Buddhist text that records the public sermons and conversations of the Chan master Huineng (638-713). The focus of the book is on the image of Huineng recreated in each translation. The book integrates quantitative and qualitative analyses, adopting corpus linguistic tools such as SysFan, SysConc, and Wmatrix. The analyses of the four translations are conducted from the perspectives of verbs of saying, personal pronouns, Mood and Modality, multimodality and evaluation, and textual complexity, which are within the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of SFL respectively. Both the recreating of images and the lexicogrammatical choices are further interpreted by taking the context of translation (Field, Tenor, Mode) into consideration. The book provides an appropriate way to combine systemic functional linguistics with translation studies, highlighting the relationship between language, culture and translation. It also raises the question concerning the status of translated texts as the basis of scholarly research in the English world.

The biblical figure Melchizedek appears just twice in the Hebrew Bible, and once more in the Christian New Testament. Cited as both the king of Shalem-understood by most scholars to be Jerusalem-and as an eternal priest without ancestry, Melchizedek's appearances become textual justification for tithing to the Levitical priests in Jerusalem and for the priesthood of Jesus Christ himself. But what if the text was manipulated? Robert R. Cargill explores the Hebrew and Greek texts concerning Melchizedek's encounter with Abraham in Genesis as a basis to unravel the biblical mystery of this character's origins. The textual evidence that Cargill presents shows that Melchizedek was originally known as the king of Sodom and that the later traditions about Sodom forced biblical scribes to invent a new location, Shalem, for Melchizedek's priesthood and reign. Cargill also identifies minor, strategic changes to the Hebrew Bible and the Samaritan Pentateuch that demonstrate an evolving, polemical, sectarian discourse between Jews and Samaritans competing for the superiority of their respective temples and holy mountains. The resulting literary evidence was used as the ideological motivation for identifying Shalem with Jerusalem in the Second Temple Jewish tradition. A brief study with far-reaching implications, Melchizedek, King of Sodom reopens discussion of not only this unusual character, but also the origins of both the priesthood of Christ and the role of early Israelite priest-kings.

Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient Jewish romance known as Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel's God. Written in Greco-Roman Egypt around the turn of the era, Joseph and Aseneth combines the genre of the ancient Greek novel with scriptural characters from the story of Joseph as it retells Israel's mythic past to negotiate communal boundaries in its own present. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth's tale "remixes" Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel's sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel's God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God's mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundary lines the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth's very conclusions or offering alternative, competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation-one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers, including our earliest example from the Jesus Movement, negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel's God.

This new edition of the Qur'an is specifically designed to meet the needs of students of religion, and provides them with a one-volume resource comparable to what is available for the Jewish and Christian scriptures. The meticulously crafted translation affords readers not only a better sense of what the Qur'an says, but how it says it, in a rendition that strives to remain faithful to the way it was originally expressed. Accompanying the translation is an extensive set of annotations. These are keyed to the text for ready reference, and divided according to their boldface topical headings at the bottom of each page. The annotations offer a wealth of linguistic and historical detail to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the text. They also contain abundant references to parallel passages within the Qur'an, as well as comparatively among the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. With an introduction, set of maps, timeline, guide to further reading, and comprehensive index, this is the edition of the Qur'an all students of religion beginning as well as advanced will want to possess for their exploration of Islam s central text. Praise for this volume: 'The major benefit of this meticulously crafted translation is its extensive set of intratextual and intertextual references. The former cover all the major terms used in the Qur'an, providing the Arabic original word in a footnote, with usages, whether parallel or variant, from other Qur'anic chapters. The latter display an intimate engagement with both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as a range of secondary literature that can be seen to supplement brief or cryptic Qur'anic references. Both sets of references make this an indispensable companion or guide book for reading, engaging and studying the Qur'an. A further, attractive feature of Droge's annotations is the highlighting of subsets or pericopes of each chapter in the footnotes; the reader, by glancing through these bold highlighted passages, can quickly surmise what are the chief elements, as also their relationship, within each chapter. Even the most seasoned scholar, and the most devout Muslim, will learn from Droge's annotated translation. It is a treasure trove of both familiar and novel elements of the Noble Book. In sum, Arthur Droge is to be commended for the extraordinary Herculean effort.' Bruce B. Lawrence, Duke University 'At long last, a version of the Qur'an that is willing to introduce the reader to the complexities of the historical formation and secular interpretation of this important text. Droge is to be congratulated for making accessible to the student of religious studies a critical apparatus, something that is all too often ignored in other translations.' Aaron Hughes, University of Buffalo 'Several new translations of the Qur'an have appeared over the past 20 years or so. None, however, have attempted the depth and breadth of annotation of the entire text that Droge's work provides. Readers coming to the Qur'an with a desire to compare the scripture to the Biblical text will especially find the extensive citation of parallel passages to be of interest. Droge has provided lucid explanations of unclear passages and significant variant readings, making the ambiguities and challenges of the Qur'an open to all curious readers.' Andrew Rippin, University of Victoria

In ancient Israel the production of food was a basic concern of almost every Israelite. Consequently, there are few pages in the Old Testament that do not mention food, and food provides some of the most important social, political and religious symbols in the biblical text. Not Bread Alone is the first detailed and wide-ranging examination of food and its symbolism in the Old Testament and the world of ancient Israel. Many of these symbols are very well-known, such as the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the abominable pig and the land flowing with milk and honey. Nathan MacDonald demonstrates that the breadth biblical symbolism associated with food reaches beyond these celebrated examples, providing a collection of interrelated studies that draw on work on food in anthropology or other historical disciplines. The studies maintain sensitivity to the literary nature of the text as well as the many historical-critical questions that arise when studying it. Topics examined include: the nature and healthiness of the ancient Israelite diet; the relationship between food and memory in Deuteronomy; the confusion of food, sex and warfare in Judges; the place of feasting in the Israelite monarchy; the literary motif of divine judgement at the table; the use of food in articulating Israelite identity in the post-exilic period. The concluding chapter shows how some of these Old Testament concerns find resonance in the New Testament.

Whether used as a means of self-instruction or as part of higher learning coursework, this language primer is ideally suited for those wishing to learn classical Arabic and for Muslims who wish to learn Arabic exclusively for use in their religious and spiritual practice. Designed to enhance the understanding of the Qur'an and its vocabulary that has infiltrated the whole of Arabic and Islamic literature, this workbook provides 40 easy-to-follow lessons for learning Qur'anic rather than modern Arabic. Beginning with a section on the Arabic alphabet, the text moves on to individual lessons that address one or more grammatical topics, ranging from the basics of nouns, adjectives, and prepositions to the more complex concepts of the imperative, the passive, and conditional sentence, introducing new vocabulary in the process. Accompanying translation exercises, a glossary of technical terms, and an index supplement the main text.

This definitive sourcebook presents more than sixty authoritative new translations of key Islamic texts. Edited and translated by three leading specialists, Classical Islam features eight thematically-linked sections covering the Qur'an and its interpretation, the life of Muhammad, hadith, law, theology, mysticism and Islamic history. The new edition has been expanded to cover a fuller range of material illustrating the growth of Islamic thought from its seventh-century origins through to the end of the medieval period. It includes illustrations, a glossary, extensive bibliography and explanatory prefaces for each text. Classical Islam is an essential resource for the study of early and medieval Islam and its legacy.

In Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis presents an illuminating reflection on John Milton's Paradise Lost, the seminal classic that profoundly influenced Christian thought as well as Lewis's own work. Lewis a revered scholar and professor of literature closely examines the style, content, structure, and themes of Milton's masterpiece, a retelling of the biblical story from the Fall of Humankind, Satan's temptation, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Considering this story within the context of the Western literary tradition, Lewis offers invaluable insights into Paradise Lost and the nature of literature itself, unveiling the poem's beauty and its wisdom. With a clarity of thought and a style that are the trademarks of Lewis's writing, he provides answers with a lucidity and lightness that deepens our understanding of Milton's immortal work. Also inspiring new readers to revisit Paradise Lost, Lewis reminds us of why elements including ritual, splendour and joy deserve to exist and hold a sacred place in human life. One of Lewis's most revered scholarly works, Preface to Paradise Lost is an indispensable read for new and lifelong fans of Lewis's writing.

This book examines in detail the concept of "abrogation" in the Qur'an, which has played a major role in the development of Islamic law and has implications for understanding the history and integrity of the Qur'anic text. The term has gained popularity in recent years, as Muslim groups and individuals claim that many passages about tolerance in the Qur'an have been abrogated by others that call on Muslims to fight their enemies. Author Louay Fatoohi argues that this could not have been derived from the Qur'an, and that its implications contradict Qur'anic principles. He also reveals conceptual flaws in the principle of abrogation as well as serious problems with the way it was applied by different scholars. Abrogation in the Qur'an and Islamic Law traces the development of the concept from its most basic form to the complex and multi-faceted doctrine it has become. The book shows what specific problems the three modes of abrogation were introduced to solve, and how this concept has shaped Islamic law. The book also critiques the role of abrogation in rationalizing the view that not all of the Qur'anic revelation has survived in the "mushaf", or the written record of the Qur'an. This role makes understanding abrogation an essential prerequisite for studying the history of the Qur'anic text.