The timeless epic of Hindu faith contains a simple, vivid message of daily inspiration for millions throughout the world. This powerful, beautiful scripture is translated into clear, meaningful English which can be read as a living contemporary message that touches the most urgent personal and social problems. (July)

This comprehensive set includes thorough examinations of the QurA!n in Wherry's essential four volume commentary. There is also an excellent overview of Islam by the well known scholar Edward Sell, The Faith of Islam which examines the history of Islam, the different forms of Islam and religious practice. This set will prove to be an excellent historical resource for anyone interested in western scholarship of Islamic doctrine, and the writings in the QurA!n

This comprehensive set includes thorough examinations of the QurA!n in Wherry's essential four volume commentary. There is also an excellent overview of Islam by the well known scholar Edward Sell, The Faith of Islam which examines the history of Islam, the different forms of Islam and religious practice. This set will prove to be an excellent historical resource for anyone interested in western scholarship of Islamic doctrine, and the writings in the QurA!n

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 comprehensive set includes thorough examinations of the QurA!n in Wherry's essential four volume commentary. There is also an excellent overview of Islam by the well known scholar Edward Sell, The Faith of Islam which examines the history of Islam, the different forms of Islam and religious practice. This set will prove to be an excellent historical resource for anyone interested in western scholarship of Islamic doctrine, and the writings in the QurA!n

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

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.

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.

Centering on the first extant martyr story (2 Maccabees 7), this study explores the "autonomous value" of martyrdom. The story of a mother and her seven sons who die under the torture of the Greek king Antiochus displaces the long-problematic Temple sacrificial cult with new cultic practices, and presents a new family romance that encodes unconscious fantasies of child-bearing fathers and eternal mergers with mothers. This study places the martyr story in the historical context of the Hasmonean struggle for legitimacy in the face of Jewish civil wars, and uses psychoanalytic theories to analyze the unconscious meaning of the martyr-family story.

With typical eloquence and wisdom, in The Way of St Benedict Rowan Williams explores the appeal of St Benedict's sixth-century Rule, showing it to be a document of great relevance to present day Christians and non-believers at our particular moment in history. For over a millennium the Rule - a set of guidelines for monastic conduct - has been influential on the life of Benedictine monks, but has also served in some sense as a 'background note' to almost all areas of civic experience: artistic, intellectual and institutional. The effects of this on society have been far-reaching and Benedictine communities and houses still attract countless visitors, testifying to the appeal and continuing relevance of Benedict's principles. As the author writes, the chapters of his book, which range from a discussion of Abbot Cuthbert Butler's mysticism to 'Benedict and the Future of Europe', are 'simply an invitation to look at various current questions through the lens of the Rule and to reflect on aspects of Benedictine history that might have something to say to us'. With Williams as our guide, The Way of St Benedict speaks to the Rule's ability to help anyone live more fully in harmony with others whilst orientating themselves fully to the will of God.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

Long neglected by scholars, the Dead Sea scrolls rewriting Samuel-Kings shed precious light on the ancient Jewish interpretation of these books. This volume brings all these texts together for the first time under one cover. Improved editions of the fragments, up-to-date commentary, and detailed discussions of the exegetical traditions embedded in these scrolls will be of interest to both scholars and students of Second Temple Jewish literature.

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

In this publication new light is shed on the Qumran community, its organisational structure, its ultra conservative way of life, and how its leaders interpreted the books of the Old Testament by compiling their own commentaries. Emphasis is also placed on facilitating an understanding of references in the Gospels whilst providing an insight into a community that existed parallel to the New Testament community, and to which some of Jesus' followers could have belonged.

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 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

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.

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 Zohar is the fundamental work of Jewish mysticism. Isaiah Tishby's classic and definitive Wisdom of the Zohar makes the world of the Zohar available to the English-speaking reader in all its complexity and poetry. The extended extracts are arranged by topic, each section being prefaced by introductory explanations and accompanied by copious notes. There is also a General Introduction on the complex symbolism of the Zohar and on its historical and literary background. The scholarly value of David Goldstein's acclaimed translation is enhanced by an index expanded to include references to passages cited in the introduction and notes, and by the addition of a subject index and an index of biblical references. Isaiah Tishby was awarded the Bialik Prize 1972, the Israel Prize 1979, and the Rothschild Prize 1982, mainly for his work on The Wisdom of the Zohar. David Goldstein was awarded the Webber Prize 1987 for this translation.