This is a subset of the Sacred Books of the East Series which includes translations of all the most important works of the seven non-Christian religions which have exercised a profound influence on the civilizations of the continent of Asia. The works have been translated by leading authorities in their field.

The Qur'an is read by millions of Muslims on a daily basis, yet there is no book available to the reader, Arab or non-Arab, which provides a linguistic and rhetorical insight into Qur'anic discourse. This book explains Qur'an translational problems and provides a thorough account of the unique syntactic, semantic, phonetic, prosodic, pragmatic, and rhetorical features of the Qur'an.

Jerome was one of the very few early Christian scholars to know any Hebrew. This is a unique introduction, translation, and commentary of his Questions on Genesis - a fascinating work showing a Christian working alongside Jews in an age very different from our own. Jerome's influence on the Church is well known - but this work is equally important for the light thrown on the history and origin of many ideas at the heart of the Jewish tradition.

The Old Testament as Authoritative Scripture in the Early Churches of the East represents the latest scholarly research in the field of Old Testament as Scripture in Eastern Christianity. Its twelve articles focus on the use of the Old Testament in the earliest Christian communities in the East. The collection explores the authoritative role of the Old Testament in the churches of the East and its impact on the church's doctrine, liturgy, canon law, and spirituality.

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).

Tracing its history from Moses Mendelssohn to today, Alan Levenson explores the factors that shaped what is the modern Jewish Bible and its centrality in Jewish life today. The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible explains how Jewish translators, commentators, and scholars made the Bible a keystone of Jewish life in Germany, Israel and America. Levenson argues that German Jews created a religious Bible, Israeli Jews a national Bible, and American Jews an ethnic one. In each site, scholars wrestled with the demands of the non-Jewish environment and their own indigenous traditions, trying to balance fidelity and independence from the commentaries of the rabbinic and medieval world.

The most important debate in Islamic origins is that of the reliability of the lists of transmitters (isnads) that are said to guarantee the authenticity of the materials to which they are attached. Many scholars have come to the conclusion that most traditions (hadiths), which claim to preserve the words and deeds of Muhammad and early Muslim scholars, are spurious. Other scholars defend hadiths and their isnads, arguing for an early continuous written transmission of these materials. The first purpose of this study is to summarize and critique the major positions on the issue of the authenticity of hadiths in general and exegetical hadiths in particular. The second purpose is to devise a means of evaluating isnads that does not rely on circular arguments and to use it to determine if the hadiths in the Tafsir of al-Tabari, attributed to Ibn 'Abbas, are genuine.

This new work presents a concise and accessible introduction to the Qur'an. The book examines the Qur'an from two original perspectives: first, it explores the concept of deity, including the Christian and Jewish understanding of God, and secondly it discusses the Qur'anic message from the perspective of modern knowledge. This is an ideal textbook for students with no prior knowledge of the complexities of the Qur'an's message.

'Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred. It can't be improved. If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.' Stephen Mitchell's translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way) has sold over half a million copies worldwide. In this stunningly beautiful edition of the fundamental modern Taoist philosophy text, Mitchell's words are set against ancient Chinese paintings selected by Asian art expert, Dr Stephen Little.

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.

Authors from the ancient world rarely used great detail to describe the physical features of characters in their works. When they did mention bodies, they did so with very specific goals in mind. In particular, the bodies of "heroic" figures, such as warriors, kings, and other leaders became loaded sites of meaning for encoding cultural, religious, and political values on a number of fronts. Brian Doak analyzes the way biblical authors described the bodies of some of their most iconic male figures, such as Jacob, the Judges, Saul, and David. These bodies represent not mere individuals-they communicate as national bodies, signaling the ambiguity of Israel's murky pre-history, the division during the period of settlement in the land, and the contest of leading bodies fought between Saul and David. Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel examines the heroic world of ancient Israel within the Hebrew Bible, and shows that ancient Israelite literature operated within and against a world of heroic ideals in its ancient context. The heroic body tells a story of Israel's remembered history in the eventual making of the monarchy, marking a new kind of individual power. Not merely a textual study of the Hebrew Bible in isolation, this book also considers iconography and compares Israelite literature with other ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern materials, illustrating Israel's place among a wider construction of heroic bodies.

The Handy Concordance of the Quran is a thorough and comprehensive guide to the study of the Holy Quran. If may be used to locate and trace Quranic themes; to find forgotten references; to identify occurrences of a particular name or place; to study parallel passages - in fact, all forms of the Quranic study will be quicker and more accurate with this concordance as an invaluable aid.

This study of the Qur'an arises from an interest in a pressing contemporary issue, the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, 'the Ummah and the Other'.

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.

Modern critical scholars divide the Pentateuch into distinct components, identifying areas of unevenness in the scriptural tradition, which point to several interwoven documents rather than one immaculate whole. While the conclusions reached by such critical scholarship are still matters of dispute, the inconsistencies which it has identified stand clearly before us and pose a serious challenge to the believer in divine revelation. How can a text marred by contradiction be the legacy of Sinai? How can there be reverence for holy scriptures that show signs of human intervention? David Weiss Halivni explores these questions, not by disputing the evidence itself or by defending the absolute integrity of the Pentateuchal words at all costs, but rather by accepting the inconsistencies of the text as such and asking how this text might yet be a divine legacy.Inconsistencies and unevenness in the Pentateuchal scriptures are not the discovery of modern textual science alone. Halivni demonstrates that the earliest stewards of the Torah, including some of those represented in the Bible itself, were aware of discrepancies within the tradition. From the Book of Chronicles through the commentaries of the Rabbis, sensitive readers have perceived maculations, which mitigate against the notion of an unblemished, divine document, and have responded to these maculations in different ways.Revelation Restored asserts that acknowledging and accounting for human intervention in the Pentateuchal text is not alien to the Biblical or Rabbinic tradition and need not belie the tradition of revelation. Moreover, it argues that through recognizing textual problems in the scriptures, as well as efforts to resolve them in tradition, we may learn not only about the nature of the Pentateuch itself but also about the ongoing relationship between its people and its source.

The Creation of History in Ancient Israel demonstrates how the historian can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.

eBook available with sample pages: 020345524X

The Book of Hiding offers a fluent and erudite analysis of the parallels between the Bible and contemporary discussions of gender, ethnicity and social ambiguity. Beal focuses particularly on the traditionally marginalised book of Esther, in order to examine closely the categories of self and other in relation to religion, sexism, nationalism, and the ever-looming legacies and future possibilities of annihilation. Beal applies the critical tools of contemporary theorists, such as Cixous, Irigaray and Levinas, challenging widely held assumptions about the moral and life-affirming message of Scripture and even about the presence of God in the book of Esther. The Book of Hiding draws together a variety of different perspectives and disciplines, creating a unique space for dialogue raising new questions and reconsidering old assumptions, which is profoundly interesting and well-articulated.

The Book of Hiding offers a fluent and erudite analysis of the parallels between the Bible and contemporary discussions of gender, ethnicity and social ambiguity. Beal focuses particularly on the traditionally marginalised book of Esther, in order to examine closely the categories of self and other in relation to religion, sexism, nationalism, and the ever-looming legacies and future possibilities of annihilation. Beal applies the critical tools of contemporary theorists, such as Cixous, Irigaray and Levinas, challenging widely held assumptions about the moral and life-affirming message of Scripture and even about the presence of God in the book of Esther. The Book of Hiding draws together a variety of different perspectives and disciplines, creating a unique space for dialogue raising new questions and reconsidering old assumptions, which is profoundly interesting and well-articulated.

This new rendering is the first of its kind, since it combines translation and exegesis: the author 'opens out' the verses to reveal some of the layers of meaning expounded by the Prophet and transmitted through the ages by his companions, family and the scholars who followed them.

Since the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls were released in 1992, there has been an explosion of interest in them. This volume explores the issue of apocalypticism in the Scrolls; how the notions of the 'end', Messianic expectation and eternal life affected the Dead Sea sect, influenced Judaism and filtered into Christianity. Collins' volume provides a valuable and accessible introduction to the interpretation of the Scrolls, which is an informative addition to the series examining the major themes of the Scroll texts.

Since the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls were released in 1992, there has been an explosion of interest in them. This volume explores the issue of apocalypticism in the Scrolls; how the notions of the 'end', Messianic expectation and eternal life affected the Dead Sea sect, influenced Judaism and filtered into Christianity. Collins' volume provides a valuable and accessible introduction to the interpretation of the Scrolls, which is an informative addition to the series examining the major themes of the Scroll texts.

This volume assesses the religious and intellectual significance of the Hebrew bible both as a document of its time and as an important step in the development of thought. It presents the major aspects of biblical religion through detailed literary analyses of key texts, presented in English translation to make them accessible to the general reader as well as scholars. Each of the central traditions of biblical religion is examined, as well as a number of important themes, like the roles of mystery and sexuality. At the same time, the cultural and social background is explained and described, placing the ideas uncovered in a specific temporal and cultural setting.

The Bible is often said to be one of the foundation texts of Western culture. The present volume shows that it goes far beyond being a religious text. The essays explore how religious, political and cultural identities, including ethnicity and gender, are embodied in biblical discourse. Following the authors, we read the Bible with new eyes: as a critic of gender, ideology, politics and culture. We ask ourselves new questions: about God's body, about women's role, about racial prejudices and about the politics of the written word.
Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies crosses boundaries. It questions our most fundamental assumptions about the Bible. It shows how biblical studies can benefit from the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse, throwing up entirely new questions and offering surprising answers. Accessible, engaging and moving easily between theory and the reading of specific texts, this volume is an exciting contribution to contemporary biblical and cultural studies.