BITH 221: Home

See chapters in Part V on the Hebrew Bible in each of the monotheistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

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.

Gordon, Nickel. Qurʾanic and Islamic Interpretation of the Bible. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation. : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kalman, J. (2013). Rabbinic Exegesis. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation. : Oxford University Press. 2013.

Hebrew Texts in Jewish, Christian and Muslim Surroundings offers a new perspective on Judaism, Christianity and Islam as religions of the book. Their problematic relation seems to indicate that there is more that divides than unites these religions. The present volume will show that there is an intricate web of relations between the texts of these three religious traditions.

You can view the table of contents of this work via Amazon (click on title above) and request a scan of the pages you want at library.wheaton.edu/delivery.

The Bible in Arabic offers a new frame of reference for the pivotal place of Arabic Bible translations in the religious and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an side by side, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings and His temperament, and in doing so revises that which is false, distorted, or simply absent from our conception of the heart of Islam. Miles writes, "I hope that by reading this book you may find it a little easier to trust the Muslim next door, thinking of him as someone whose religion, after all, may not be so wildly unreasonable that someone holding to it could not be a trusted friend."

The seventeen studies in Golden Calf Traditions in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam explore the biblical origins of the golden calf story in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and 1 Kings, as well as its reception in a variety of sources: Hebrew Scriptures (Hosea, Jeremiah, Psalms, Nehemiah), Second Temple Judaism (Animal Apocalypse, Pseudo-Philo, Philo, Josephus), rabbinic Judaism, the New Testament (Acts, Paul, Hebrews, Revelation) and early Christianity (among Greek, Latin, and Syriac writers), as well as the Qur'an and Islamic literature. Expert contributors explore how each ancient author engaged with the calf traditions--whether explicitly, implicitly, or by clearly and consciously avoiding them--and elucidate how the story was used both negatively and positively for didactic, allegorical, polemical, and even apologetic purposes.

The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, including the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by the Jews and the Christians and abrogated by the Quran, God's final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief.