This book explores the story of the Israelites' worship of the Golden Calf in its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contexts, from ancient Israel to the emergence of Islam. It focuses in particular on the Qur'an's presentation of the narrative and its background in Jewish and Christian retellings of the episode from Late Antiquity. Across the centuries, the interpretation of the Calf episode underwent major changes reflecting the varying cultural, religious, and ideological contexts in which various communities used the story to legitimate their own tradition, challenge the claims of others, and delineate the boundaries between self and other. The book contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of the relationship between Bible and Qur'an, arguing for the necessity of understanding the Qur'an and Islamic interpretations of the history and narratives of ancient Israel as part of the broader biblical tradition. The Calf narrative in the Qur'an, central to the qur'anic conception of the legacy of Israel and the status of the Jews of its own time, reflects a profound engagement with the biblical account in Exodus, as well as being informed by exegetical and parascriptural traditions in circulation in the Qur'an's milieu in Late Antiquity. The book also addresses the issue of Western approaches to the Qur'an, arguing that the historical reliance of scholars and translators on classical Muslim exegesis of scripture has led to misleading conclusions about the meaning of qur'anic episodes.

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.

Although there were no self-avowed British atheists before the 1780s, authors including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper worried extensively about atheism's dystopian possibilities, and routinely represented atheists as being beyond the pale of human sympathy. Challenging traditional formulations of secularization that equate modernity with unbelief, Reeves reveals how reactions against atheism rather helped sustain various forms of religious belief throughout the Age of Enlightenment. He demonstrates that hostility to unbelief likewise produced various forms of religious ecumenicalism, with authors depicting non-Christian theists from around Britain's emerging empire as sympathetic allies in the fight against irreligion. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain for the first time, revealing a relationship between atheism and secularization far more fraught than has previously been supposed.

What are Christians saying when they call the Bible the Word of God? How is that statement to be understood in relation to postmodernity's suspicion of meaning? Word and Supplement tackles these questions by bringing the post-modern theory of Derrida (from whom the idea of "supplement" is borrowed), Barth, Fish, Gadamer, and many others into critical dialogue with the often-neglected doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.

Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt addresses the extraordinary rise and inner life of the Egyptian pietist movement in the first half of the thirteenth century. The creative engagement with the dominant Islamic culture was always present, even when unspoken. Elisha Russ-Fishbane calls attention to the Sufi subtext of Jewish pietiem, while striving not to reduce its spiritual synthesis and religious renewal to a set of political calculations. Ultimately, no single term or concept can fully address the creative expression of pietism that so animated Jewish society and that left its mark in numerous manuscripts and fragments from medieval Egypt. Russ-Fishbane offers a nuanced examination of the pietist sources on their own terms, drawing as far as possible upon their own definitions and perceptions. Jewish society in thirteenth-century Egypt reflects the dynamic reexamination by a venerable community of its foundational texts and traditions, even of its very identity and institutions, viewed and reviewed in the full light of its Islamic environment. The historical legacy of this religious synthesis belongs at once to the realm of Jewish culture, in all its diversity and dynamism, as well as to the broader spiritual orbit of Islamicate civilization.

In the current political and social climate, there is increasing demand for a deeper understanding of Muslims, the Qur’an and Islam, as well as a keen demand among Muslim scholars to explore ways of engaging with Christians theologically, culturally, and socially. This book explores the ways in which an awareness of Islam and the Qur’an can change the way in which the Bible is read. The contributors come from both Muslim and Christian backgrounds, bring various levels of commitment to the Qur’an and the Bible as Scripture, and often have significantly different perspectives. The first section of the book contains chapters that compare the report of an event in the Bible with a report of the same event in the Qur’an. The second section addresses Muslim readings of the Bible and biblical tradition and looks at how Muslims might regard the Bible - Can they recognise it as Scripture? If so, what does that mean, and how does it relate to the Qur’an as Scripture? Similarly, how might Christian readers regard the Qur’an? The final section explores different analogies for understanding the Bible in relation to the Qur’an. The book concludes with a reflection upon the particular challenges that await Muslim scholars who seek to respond to Jewish and Christian understandings of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. A pioneering venture into intertextual reading, this book has important implications for relationships between Christians and Muslims. It will be of significant value to scholars of both Biblical and Qur’anic Studies, as well as any Muslim seeking to deepen their understanding of the Bible, and any Christian looking to transform the way in which they read the Bible.

One of the leading scholars of ancient West Semitic religion discusses polytheism vs. monotheism by covering the fluidity of those categories in the ancient Near East. He argues that Israel's social history is key to the development of monotheism.

The seventeen studies in Golden Calf Traditions in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam explore the biblical origins of the golden calf story and its reception--whether explicit or implicit, negative or positive, or clearly and consciously avoided--in early Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature.