Download or read book Veiling Esther Unveiling Her Story written by Adam J. Silverstein and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story: The Reception of a Biblical Book in Islamic Lands examines the ways in which the Biblical Book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It focuses on case studies covering works from various periods andregions of the Muslim world, including the Qur'an, pre-modern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian encyclopaedia, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther,which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. Adam J. Silverstein argues that Muslim sources preserve important pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman's epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecairefused to prostrate before Haman, and the literary context of the 'plot of the eunuchs' to kill the Persian king. Throughout the book, Silverstein shows how each author's cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story. In particular, hehighlights that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.
Download or read book Veiling Esther Unveiling Her Story written by Adam J. Silverstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story: The Reception of a Biblical Book in Islamic Lands examines the ways in which the Biblical Book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It focuses on case studies covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur'an, pre-modern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian encyclopaedia, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. Adam J. Silverstein argues that Muslim sources preserve important pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman's epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate before Haman, and the literary context of the 'plot of the eunuchs' to kill the Persian king. Throughout the book, Silverstein shows how each author's cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story. In particular, he highlights that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.
Download or read book The Transforming Word Series Volume 2 written by Mark Hamilton and published by ACU Press. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nation of Israel tells its story of the rise of kings not once but twice (Joshua–2 Kings, 1–2 Chronicles); and during this period, they wrote Psalms and gathered together their wise sayings. Then, plunged into the darkness of exile, they had to discover again who God was and what kind of life he called them to live. In the same way, Christians read these texts today for what they share about a promised Messiah and how they explain what life with God looks like in all its complexity.
Download or read book A History of Muslim Views of the Bible written by Martin Whittingham and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first of two volumes that aim to produce something not previously attempted: a synthetic history of Muslim responses to the Bible, stretching from the rise of Islam to the present day. It combines scholarship with a genuine narrative, so as to tell the story of Muslim engagement with the Bible. Covering Sunnī, Imāmī Shī'ī and Ismā'īlī perspectives, this study will offer a scholarly overview of three areas of Muslim response, namely ideas of corruption, use of the Biblical text, and abrogation of the text. For each period of history, the important figures and dominant trends, along with exceptions, are identified. The interplay between using and criticising the Bible is explored, as well as how the respective emphasis on these two approaches rises and falls in different periods and locations. The study critically engages with existing scholarship, scrutinizing received views on the subject, and shedding light on an important area of interfaith concern.
Download or read book Holy War in Judaism written by Reuven Firestone and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy war, sanctioned or even commanded by God, is a common and recurring theme in the Hebrew Bible. Rabbinic Judaism, however, largely avoided discussion of holy war in the Talmud and related literatures for the simple reason that it became dangerous and self-destructive. Reuven Firestone's Holy War in Judaism is the first book to consider how the concept of ''holy war'' disappeared from Jewish thought for almost 2000 years, only to reemerge with renewed vigor in modern times. The revival of the holy war idea occurred with the rise of Zionism. As the necessity of organized Jewish engagement in military actions developed, Orthodox Jews faced a dilemma. There was great need for all to engage in combat for the survival of the infant state of Israel, but the Talmudic rabbis had virtually eliminated divine authorization for Jews to fight in Jewish armies. Once the notion of divinely sanctioned warring was revived, it became available to Jews who considered that the historical context justified more aggressive forms of warring. Among some Jews, divinely authorized war became associated not only with defense but also with a renewed kibbush or conquest, a term that became central to the discourse regarding war and peace and the lands conquered by the state of Israel in 1967. By the early 1980's, the rhetoric of holy war had entered the general political discourse of modern Israel. In Holy War in Judaism, Firestone identifies, analyzes, and explains the historical, conceptual, and intellectual processes that revived holy war ideas in modern Judaism.
Download or read book The Seven Pillars of Creation written by William P. Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their highly selective and literal reading of Scripture, creationists champion a rigidly reductionistic view of creation in their fight against "soulless scientism." Conversely, many scientists find faith in God to be a dangerous impediment in the empirical quest for knowledge. As a result of this ongoing debate, many people of faith feel forced to choose between evolution and the Bible's story of creation. But, as William Brown asks, which biblical creation story are we talking about? Brown shows that, through a close reading of biblical texts, no fewer than seven different biblical perspectives on creation can be identified. By examining these perspectives, Brown illuminates both connections and conflicts between the ancient creation traditions and the natural sciences, arguing for a new way of reading the Bible in light of current scientific knowledge and with consideration of the needs of the environment. In Brown's argument, both scientific inquiry and theological reflection are driven by a sense of wonder, which, in his words, "unites the scientist and the psalmist." Brown's own wonder at the beauty and complexity of the created world is evident throughout this intelligent, well-written, and inspirational book.
Download or read book Rereading the City rereading Dickens written by Efraim Sicher and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interrogation of Dickens' London in a systematic reading. The author's discussions of the novels in their relation to the social, political, technological and scientific discourses of the time articulates metaphoric and mystic aspects of Dickens' urban realism.
Download or read book Islamic History A Very Short Introduction written by Adam J. Silverstein and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-01-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does history matter? This book argues not that history matters, but that Islamic history does. This Very Short Introduction introduces the story of Islamic history; the controversies surrounding its study; and the significance that it holds - for Muslims and for non-Muslims alike. Opening with a lucid overview of the rise and spread of Islam, from the seventh to twenty first century, the book charts the evolution of what was originally a small, localised community of believers into an international religion with over a billion adherents. Chapters are also dedicated to the peoples - Arabs, Persians, and Turks - who shaped Islamic history, and to three representative institutions - the mosque, jihad, and the caliphate - that highlight Islam's diversity over time. Finally, the roles that Islamic history has played in both religious and political contexts are analysed, while stressing the unique status that history enjoys amongst Muslims, especially compared to its lowly place in Western societies where history is often seen as little more than something that is not to be repeated. Some of the questions that will be answered are: · How did Islam arise from the obscurity of seventh century Arabia to the headlines of twenty first century media? · How do we know what we claim to know about Islam's rise and development? · Why does any of this matter, either to Muslims or to non-Muslims? ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Purity Community and Ritual in Early Christian Literature written by Moshe Blidstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to develop their own ideas about purity, purification, defilement, and disgust.
Download or read book Yiddish written by Jeffrey Shandler and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides an introduction to Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, both as a subject of interest in its own right and for the distinctive issues that Yiddish raises for the study of languages generally, including language diaspora, language fusion, multilingualism, language ideologies, and postvernacularity. By approaching the study of Yiddish through the rubric of a biography, rather than following a more conventional chronological, geographical, or ideological approach, this book examines the story of Yiddish thematically. Each chapter addresses a different "biographical" topic concerning the character of the language and how it has been conceptualized, ranging across time, space, and speech communities. These chapters interrelate discussions of the language's origins, characteristics, and development with the dynamics of its implementation in Ashkenazi culture from the Middle Ages to the present. These thematic chapters also examine the symbolic investments that both Jews and others have made in Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding both general perceptions and scholarly analyses of the language, especially in the modern period"--
Download or read book MishnahEnglish written by Amram D. Tropper and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In third-century CE Palestine, the leading member of the rabbinic movement put together a highly popular wisdom treatise entitled Tractate Avot. Though Avot has inspired hundreds of commentaries, this book marks the first comprehensive effort to situate Avot within the context of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Following his novel interpretation of Avot, Amram Tropper relates the text to ancient Jewish literary paradigms as well as to relevant socio-political, literary, and intellectual streams of the contemporary Near East. Through comparisons to ancient wisdom literature, the Second Sophistic, Greek and Christian historiography, contemporary collections of sayings, and classical Roman jurisprudence, Tropper interprets Avot in light of the local Jewish context as well as the ambient cultural atmosphere of the contemporary Near East.
Download or read book Egypt as a Woman written by Beth Baron and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Can anything new be said about modern Egyptian nationalism? Beth Baron's book Egypt as a Woman, one of the best modern Egyptian history books to appear in several years, leaves no doubt that it can. With evenhandedness and generosity, Baron shows how vital women were to mobilizing opposition to British authority and modernizing Egypt.”—Robert L. Tignor, author of Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire “A wonderful contribution to understanding Egyptian national and gender politics between the two world wars. Baron explores the paradox of women’s exclusion from political rights at the very moment when visual and metaphorical representations of Egypt as a woman were becoming widespread and real women activists—both secularist and Islamist—were participating more actively in public life than ever before.”—Donald Malcolm Reid, author of Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I
Download or read book The Torn Veil written by Sister Gulshan Esther and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2004 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Muslim girl, imprisoned by her religion and severe disability, is healed and set free by God.
Download or read book Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation written by Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2002 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating study, R. S. Sugirtharajah explores the implications of postcolonial criticism for biblical studies. He reveals how postcolonial criticism can offer an alternative perspective to our understanding of the Bible, and how, when the Bible has been deployed as a Western cultural icon, it has come to be questioned in new ways.
Download or read book Albert Cohen written by Jack I. Abecassis and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention winner in the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize competition for French and Francophone Literary Studies A major figure in twentieth-century letters, Albert Cohen (1895–1981) left a paradoxical legacy. His heavily autobiographical, strikingly literary, and polyphonic novels and lyrical essays are widely read by a devout public in France, yet have been largely ignored by academia. A self-consciously Jewish writer and activist, Cohen remained nevertheless ambivalent about Judaism. His self-affirmation as a Jew in juxtaposition with his satirical use of anti-Semitic stereotypes still provokes unease in both republican France and institutional Judaism. In Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, the first English-language study of this profound and profoundly misunderstood writer, Jack I. Abecassis traces the recurrent themes of Cohen's works. He reveals the dissonant fractures marking Cohen as a modernist, and analyzes the resistance to his work as a symptom of the will not to understand Cohen's main theme—"the catastrophe of being Jewish."For Abecassis, Cohen's diverse oeuvre forms a single "roman fleuve" exploring this perturbing theme through fragmentation and grotesquerie, fantasies and nightmares, the veiling and unveiling of the unspeakable. Abecassis argues that Cohen should not be read exclusively through the prism of European literature (Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust), but rather as the retelling—inverting and ultimately exhausting, in the form of submerged plots—of the Biblical romances of Joseph and Esther. The romance of the charismatic Court Jew and its performance correlative, the carnival of Purim, generate the logic of Cohen's acute psychological ambivalence, historical consciousness and carnal sensuality—themes which link this modernist author to Genesis as well as to the literary practices of Sephardic crypto-Jews. Abecassis argues that Cohen's best-known work, Belle du Seigneur (1968), besides being an obvious tale of obsessive love and dissolution, is foremost a tale of political intrigue involving Solal, the meteoric-rising Jew in the League of Nations during the period of Appeasement (1936), and his ultimate self-destruction. Providing close readings and imaginative analyses of the entire literary output of one of twentieth-century France's most important Jewish writers, Abecassis presents here a major work of literary scholarship, as well as a broader study of the reception and influence of Jewish thought in French literature and philosophy.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions written by Adam Silverstein and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions includes authoritative yet accessible studies on a wide variety of topics dealing comparatively with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as with the interactions between the adherents of these religions throughout history. The comparative study of the Abrahamic Religions has been undertaken for many centuries. More often than not, these studies reflected a polemical rather than an ecumenical approach to the topic. Since the nineteenth century, the comparative study of the Abrahamic Religions has not been pursued either intensively or systematically, and it is only recently that the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has received more serious attention. This volume contributes to the emergence and development of the comparative study of the Abrahamic religions, a discipline which is now in its formative stages. This Handbook includes both critical and supportive perspectives on the very concept of the Abrahamic religions and discussions on the role of the figure of Abraham in these religions. It features 32 essays, by the foremost scholars in the field, on the historical interactions between Abrahamic communities; on Holy Scriptures and their interpretation; on conceptions of religious history; on various topics and strands of religious thought, such as monotheism and mysticism; on rituals of prayer, purity, and sainthood, on love in the three religions and on fundamentalism. The volume concludes with three epilogues written by three influential figures in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities, to provide a broader perspective on the comparative study of the Abrahamic religions. This ground-breaking work introduces readers to the challenges and rewards of studying these three religions together.
Download or read book The Arab Renaissance written by Tarek El-Ariss and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An anthology of Arabic texts and English translations of works from the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) on modernity, language, gender, transnationalism, literary criticism, politics, travel, social justice, technology, history, and commerce. The edition is designed for the classroom, with an introduction, translator's note, and textual notes for students and teachers"--
