Much of the Old Testament narrates what it claims to be the history of Israel. However, a close reading of the biblical text in conjunction with other literary and archaeological evidence indicates that the "history" provided by the Old Testament is frequently inaccurate or untrue. Marc Zvi Brettler explores alternative ways of reading the biblical texts. Through an indepth analysis of texts from the "Book of Chronicles", "Genesis", "Deuteronomy", "Judges" and "Samuel", Brettler shows how the biblical historians were influenced by four key factors: typology, interpretation of earlier texts, satire and ideology. This work demonstrates how the historian, by taking account of this model of history writing, can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.

Day by day, here are:
- Prayers and meditations that console the one who mourns and assist the one who has died
- Scriptural passages
- Reflections from Church Fathers, saints, and theologians
- Answers to the most commonly-asked questions about purgatory.

Aysha A. Hidayatullah offers the first comprehensive examination of contemporary feminist Qur'anic interpretation, exploring its dynamic challenges to Islamic tradition and contemporary Muslim views of the Qur'an. She analyzes major feminist readings of the Qur'an beginning in the late twentieth century, synthesizing their common concepts and methods and revealing their vital part in the development of the nascent field of Qur'anic tafsir (exegesis). Hidayatullah contributes her own critical assessment of feminist ''impasses'' in the Qur'anic text and the field's appeals to the principles of equality and justice. She expands these observations into a radical critique of feminist approaches to the Qur'an, arguing that the feminist exegetical endeavor has reached a point of irresolvable contradiction by making claims about the Qur'an that are not fully supported by the text. Hidayatullah outlines major challenges to the authority of feminist interpretations of the Qur'an and interrogates the feminist premises on which they have relied, questioning the viability of current strands of feminist Qur'anic interpretation and proposing a major revision of its exegetical positions. An innovative work of Muslim feminist theology, this volume offers an essential contribution to conversations about feminist tafsir and asking bold questions at the ''edge'' of Qur'anic interpretation.

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 "Lotus of the Wonderful (or Mystic) Law" is the most important religious book of the Far East, and has been described as "The Gospel of Half Asia". It is also the chief scripture of Buddhism in China, and therefore the chief source of consolation of the many millions of Buddhists in East Asia. It is justifiable to consider it as one of the greatest and most formative books of the world, and the text is here translated for the use of the Western student whilst an endeavour is made to reveal the contour of the most spiritual drama known in the Far East.

This book investigates two matters which initially appear unconnected: the nature of Buddha's enlightenment and the meaning of Buddhist symbolism. It concludes that these are in fact connected because they ultimately deal with meditative practice. The authors examine the relationship that appears to exist between Buddhist meditative techniques and certain examples of Buddhist symbolism as found in the earliest Pali texts and in the so-called twilight language of the tantras. In doing so, they bring together two approaches of Buddhist hermeneutics which in the past have never been properly integrated: the meditative-descriptive approach and the scholarly-historical approach. The result is an original interpretation of the higher stages of the Buddhist path of enlightenment, and of key aspects of Buddhist cosmology and doctrine.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

Leading scholars reflect the wide range of modern perspectives on the Qu'ran and on the Muslim exegetical tradition.

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.

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.

This book provides a translation, with introduction, commentary, and annotation, of the medieval Hindu Sanskrit text the Devi Gita (Song of the Goddess). It is an important but not well-known text from the rich Sakta (Goddess) tradition of India. The Devi Gita was composed about the fifteenth century C.E., in partial imitation of the famous Bhagavad Gita (Song of the Lord), composed some fifteen centuries earlier.

Around the sixth century C.E., following the rise of several male deities to prominence, a new theistic movement began in which the supreme being was envisioned as female, known as the Great Goddess (Maha-Devi). Appearing first as a violent and blood-loving deity, this Goddess gradually evolved into a more benign figure, a compassionate World-Mother and bestower of salvific wisdom. It is in this beneficent mode that the Goddess appears in the Devi Gita.

This work makes available an up-to-date translation of the Devi Gita, along with a historical and theological analysis of the text. The book is divided into sections of verses, and each section is followed by a comment explaining key terms, concepts, ritual procedures, and mythic themes. The comments also offer comparisons with related schools of thought, indicate parallel texts and textual sources of verses in the Devi Gita, and briefly elucidate the historical and religious background, supplementing the remarks of the introduction.

The books of the Hebrew Bible were created by anonymous writers during the first millennium before the Common Era (BCE). Their messages and concerns are the central theme of the book. The writings that make up the Hebrew Bible are expressions of their great creativity, their interpretation of life in their own time and their perception of its meaning. It is easy for readers to get lost in the minutiae of biblical criticism, which has concerned itself for so long with historical reconstruction. This book will encourage them to listen carefully to what the biblical writers are saying to allow the message of the Hebrew Bible to emerge once again.
In a sense, too, the intrinsic value of the Hebrew Bible is now re-emerging, after centuries of Christian interpretation, and its importance - as a literature from which three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have developed - is beginning to be understood.
This book is not another history of Israel, nor an introduction to the books of the Hebrew Bible. It is an exploration, an invitation to the reader to set off on an expedition of discovery. It may perplex readers that scholars disagree, often fundamentally, on virtually every issue: Creating the Old Testament raises and discusses issues, so that the reader can observe how hypotheses are formed and how the apparently 'assured results' of scholarship are constantly tested. In following this path, readers are encouraged to develop their skill in evaluating historical data, recognizing textual problems, interpreting symbolic language and understanding the deep concerns of biblical writers. They will investigate different and varied exegetical traditions. They will be stirred to reflect on what the biblical books have to say for life today, whether viewed from a Jewish, Christian, Muslim or secular perspective.

Prayer is an important religious practice that is rarely studied from the perspective of politics - and yet it should be. Though some forms of Protestantism teach that prayer should be individual and private, this is an exception rather than a rule. In many other religions and cultures, the regulation of collective and public prayer cannot be separated from the complex world of politics. Where is prayer allowed, and where not? Who can participate, and who can't? How should you pray - and how shouldn't you? Prayer is subject to a host of both written and unwritten political rules. From the Pentecostal religious battle - where prayer is both sword and shield against the Satanic Other - to the relations between Islam and Christianity, prayer as spiritual warfare can be found cross-culturally and across the world. This book brings together case studies of the political salience of prayer in Nigeria, France, India, Russia, and the United States. It deals with Christian, Muslim, and Hindu practices. In a world where religious tensions are ever-present, it reminds us of the intensely political nature of prayer. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Religious and Political Practice.

Most scholars studying the first five books of the Bible either attempt to dissect it into various pre-pentateuchal documents or, at the very least, analyze Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as separate, self-contained documents. The Pentateuch As Narrative focuses on the narrative and literary continuity of the Pentateuch as a whole. It seeks to disclose how the original Jewish readers may have viewed this multivolume work of Moses. Its central thesis is that the Pentateuch was written from the perspective of one who had lived under the Law of the Covenant established at Mount Sinai and had seen its failure to produce genuine trust in the Lord God of Israel. In this context, the Pentateuch pointed the reader forward to the hope of the New Covenant, based on divine faithfulness. Throughout the commentary Dr. Sailhamer pays close attention to and interacts with a wide range of classical and contemporary literature on the Pentateuch, written by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.

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.

Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in interest in the book of Genesis - the first book of the Bible - and a foundational text of Western culture. In this new commentary, Thomas Brodie offers a complete and accessible overview of Genesis from literary, theological, and historical standpoints. Brodie's work is organized around three main ideas: the first is that the primary subject of Genesis is human existence - while full of historical echoes, it is primarily a sophisticated portrayal of the progress and pitfalls of human life. His second thesis is that Genesis' basic organizational unity is binary, or diptych: building on older insights that Genesis is somehow dialogical, he argues that the entire book is composed of diptychs - accounts which, like some paintings, consist of two parts or panels. Finally, Brodie contends that many of Genesis' sources still exist, and can be identified and verified.