From the bestselling author of "The Know-It-All" comes a fascinating and timely exploration of religion and the Bible. Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes. Jacobs's quest transforms his life even more radically than the year spent reading the entire "Encyclopedia Britannica" for "The Know-It-All." His beard grows so unruly that he is regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations - much to his wife's chagrin. Throughout the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally. He tours a Kentucky-based creationist museum and sings hymns with Pennsylvania Amish. He dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and does Scripture study with Jehovah's Witnesses. He discovers ancient biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first-century brain.Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers both secular and religious, "The Year of Living Biblically" is part Cliff Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down.

"Its scholarship is impeccable, yet it reads like a novel ... Makes available in one volume the Bible's timeless stories of love, deceit, and the human condition; its important laws and ideas; and an annotated listing of all 613 laws of the Torah." --

"An award-winning translation brings new immediacy to these beloved books of the Bible. Read them for the first time, again. These five late biblical books offer readers a range of pleasures not usually associated with the Bible. They are artful, entertaining literary works-innovative, even startling. Women often stand center stage. Song of Songs is a celebration of young love, frankly sensuous, with no reference to God or covenant. It offers some of the most beautiful love poems of the ancient world. The story of Queen Esther's shrewd triumph is a secular entertainment that mixes farce with sly sexual comedy. The character of Ruth embodies the virtues of loyalty, love, and charity in a harmonious world. Enigma replaces harmony in Daniel, whose feverish night dreams envision the end of time. And the traditions of prophecy are recast in the tale of a fish that, on God's command, swallows Jonah and imprisons him in its dark wet innards for three days. Alter's translation restores the original power of these popular books"--

This book is the result of a lifetime of study of the Hebrew Bible by a mature scholar whose love of the Tanakh, and especially of the Psalter, shines through on every page.

You don't have to be a mystic to enjoy Rabbi Shefa Gold's new commentary on the Song of Songs, but it may make you into one. Rather than address herself to the reader, she speaks directly, and passionately, to God, The Beloved. She invites us to share in her conversation with life itself, with the mystery that wells "at the center of every molecule, at the heart of my being." IN THE FEVER OF LOVE breathes new life into the ancient practice of both Jews and Christians to read the Song as an allegory of the love between God and human beings. This rich, poetic text of can be used for pondering, praying, and perceiving life in a deeper way by people of any faith, but remains deeply rooted in Judaism's down-to-earth approach to the world. Rabbi Gold brings a modern psychological awareness to this ancient text.For those who want specific directions, she appends ten "commandments" from the Song which can be maxims for daily living.

The Anchor Bible: Leviticus 17-22 A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary brings us to the heart of the book. These chapters focus mainly on the practice of holiness required of laity and priest alike. The Commandments that lead to holiness are detailed in Chapter 19, the core of the book, if not the whole Torah. The acme of this chapter, the author maintains is not "love your neighbor (read Israelites) as yourself", but love him (read the alien) as yourself", endowing him with equal civil rights. With its English translations that convey the nuance and power of the original Hebrew, this commentary takes its place alongside the best of the Anchor Bible Commentaries.

In their lyrical new translation of the Song of Songs, Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch restore the sensuousness of the original in language that is rich, joyous, and passionate. Scrupulously faithful to the Hebrew text, the Blochs strip away the veils of mistranslation that have obscured this great love poem to reveal it in all its magical freshness. In her Introduction, Chana Bloch reflects on the centrality of women in the Song and on the role of King Solomon. She discusses the poem's authorship and date, as well as the tortuous (and often amusing) history of misinterpretation, and suggests how such an unabashedly secular work came to be included in the canon of Holy Scripture. Ariel Bloch's Commentary offers imaginative new readings of passages that have puzzled exegetes for centuries. In his Afterword, the biblical scholar Robert Alter surveys the newly revealed sensuousness of the poem's erotic landscape.

"From one of the most acclaimed biblical commentators at work today, the third book in her award-winning series of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Numbers is the narrative of a great failure. What should have been for the Israelites a brief journey from Mount Sinai to the Holy Land becomes a forty-year death march. Both before and after the devastating report of the spies, the narrative centers on the people's desire to return to Egypt, to undo the miraculous work of the Exodus. This view of the wilderness history invites us to a different kind of listening to the many cries of distrust, lament, resentment that issue from the Israelites throughout the Book of Numbers. Is there a way to integrate this narrative of dark murmurings, of obsessive fantasies of return to Egypt, with the celebration of a love-intoxicated wilderness discourse? The question touches not only on the language the Israelites speak but also on the very nature of human utterance. Who are these people? Who are we who listen to them? What effect does the cumulative trauma of slavery, the miracles of Exodus, the revelation at Sinai have on a nation that is beginning to speak? In Bewilderments, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg posits fascinating answers to these questions through the magnificent literary, scholarly, and psychological analysis of the text that is her trademark"--

Extracts from the Bible a hidden narrative heretofore overlooked, an epic story of love, hate, tyranny, and redemption that was cut up by the Bible's ancient editors.

Tap into the wisdom of one of the world's ancient religions by meditating on Rabbi Wittenberg's engaging, contemporary, spiritual, social and ethical insights. Relevant to Jews, Christian and spiritual seekers of all faiths and none, this book is rooted in decades of devoted immersion in Jewish learning, humanist literature, concern for people at all ages and stages of life, environmental activism and a love of nature. Over the hundred and more passages, key issues considered includes: Compassion and kindness; Creation and wonder; Emotional struggle; Environment and our relationship to nature; Ethical challenges; Illness and suffering; Identity and community; Justice and Social Justice; Refugess and strangers; Remorse and repentance; Responsibility; Searching for meaning; Seeking God.

Tap into the wisdom of one of the world's ancient religions by meditating on Rabbi Wittenberg's engaging, contemporary, spiritual, social and ethical insights. Relevant to Jews, Christian and spiritual seekers of all faiths and none, this book is rooted in decades of devoted immersion in Jewish learning, humanist literature, concern for people at all ages and stages of life, environmental activism and a love of nature. Over the hundred and more passages, key issues considered includes: Compassion and kindness; Creation and wonder; Emotional struggle; Environment and our relationship to nature; Ethical challenges; Illness and suffering; Identity and community; Justice and Social Justice; Refugess and strangers; Remorse and repentance; Responsibility; Searching for meaning; Seeking God.

"The Song of Songs is among the most accessible of all biblical books. It is also the most deeply ecological text of the canon, yet few people are aware of the Song's ecological message. The intention of Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis is to illuminate that message. Today there is such urgency around our many earth crises-so much brokenness-that we need a vision of wholeness and an ecological language that can help inspire, soothe and reinvigorate us, and bring us together regardless of our various affiliations and ideologies. The Song offers both ecological language and a vision. It sets the natural world before us with intensity and beauty, bidding us to savor it with all of our senses so that we may return to the world with the renewed clarity, love and energy necessary to work toward a healthy future for the earth and all her inhabitants. The Song is a particularly powerful book since it never utters the name of the divine, yet is a deeply spiritual work that may reach people who are interested in matters of the sacred, but prefer to steer clear of God language and conventional religious ideas. In both the Jewish and Christian worlds, where many people are disengaging from religion altogether, the Song-with its universal themes of love, justice and the integrity of nature-may help open the door to the possibilities which religion has to offer. Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in an Age of Climate Crisis seeks to engage a wide readership including all people who love the earth and its inhabitants, outdoor enthusiasts, spiritual seekers, poets, feminists, and students of the humanities, religion and ecology"--

Quoting King Solomon's famous prayer to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, "Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded," Alicia Suskin Ostriker posits a God who cannot be contained by dogma and doctrine. Troubled by the way the Bible has become identified in our culture with a monolithic authoritarianism, Ostriker focuses instead on the extraordinary variability of Biblical writing. For the Love of God is a provocative and inspiring re-interpretation of six essential Biblical texts: The Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, and Job. In prose that is personal and probing, analytically acute and compellingly readable, Ostriker sees these writings as "counter-texts," deviating from convention yet deepening and enriching the Bible, our images of God, and our own potential spiritual lives. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," she shows how the Bible embraces sexuality and skepticism, boundary crossing and challenges to authority, how it illuminates the human psyche and mirrors our own violent times, and how it asks us to make difficult choices in the quest for justice. For better or worse, our society is wedded to the Bible. But according to Talmud, "There is always another interpretation." Ostriker demonstrates that the Bible, unlike its reputation, offers a plenitude of surprises.

Bestselling and prize-winning Israeli author Shalev describes the many "firsts" of the Bible--from the first love and the first death to the first laugh and the first dream--providing readers with a fresh, secular, and surprising look at the stories they think they know.

Imagine that you could really understand the Bible...that you could read, analyze, and discuss the book of Genesis not as a compositional mystery, a cultural relic, or a linguistic puzzle palace, or even as religious doctrine, but as a philosophical classic, precisely in the same way that a truth-seeking reader would study Plato or Nietzsche. Imagine that you could be led in your study by one of America's preeminent intellectuals and that he would help you to an understanding of the book that is deeper than you'd ever dreamed possible, that he would reveal line by line, verse by verse the incredible riches of this illuminating text -- one of the very few that actually deserve to be called seminal. Imagine that you could get, from Genesis, the beginning of wisdom. The Beginning of Wisdom is a hugely learned book that, like Genesis itself, falls naturally into two sections. The first shows how the universal history described in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, from creation to the tower of Babel, conveys, in the words of Leon Kass, "a coherent anthropology" -- a general teaching about human nature -- that "rivals anything produced by the great philosophers." Serving also as a mirror for the reader's self-discovery, these stories offer profound insights into the problematic character of human reason, speech, freedom, sexual desire, the love of the beautiful, pride, shame, anger, guilt, and death. Something as seemingly innocuous as the monotonous recounting of the ten generations from Adam to Noah yields a powerful lesson in the way in which humanity encounters its own mortality. In the story of the tower of Babel are deep understandings of the ambiguous power of speech, reason, and the arts; the hazards of unity and aloneness; the meaning of the city and its quest for self-sufficiency; and man's desire for fame, immortality, and apotheosis -- and the disasters these necessarily cause. Against this background of human failure, Part Two of The Beginning of Wisdom explores the struggles to launch a new human way, informed by the special Abrahamic covenant with the divine, that might address the problems and avoid the disasters of humankind's natural propensities. Close, eloquent, and brilliant readings of the lives and educations of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's sons reveal eternal wisdom about marriage, parenting, brotherhood, education, justice, political and moral leadership, and of course the ultimate question: How to live a good life? Connecting the two "parts" is the book's overarching philosophical and pedagogical structure: how understanding the dangers and accepting the limits of human powers can open the door to a superior way of life, not only for a solitary man of virtue but for an entire community -- a life devoted to righteousness and holiness. This extraordinary book finally shows Genesis as a coherent whole, beginning with the creation of the natural world and ending with the creation of a nation that hearkens to the awe-inspiring summons to godliness. A unique and ambitious commentary, a remarkably readable literary exegesis and philosophical companion, The Beginning of Wisdom is one of the most important books in decades on perhaps the most important -- and surely the most frequently read -- book of all time.

In this spellbinding new novel, bestselling author Alan Gold re-creates one of the most notorious stories of the Bible. Seductive, passionate and surprising, Jezebel's story is like no other.For the past three thousand years, Jezebel has been portrayed as the ultimate seducer, a murderess who stole and lied and cheated, the woman who fought against the prophet Elijah.But was this mysterious young woman really promiscuous and evil? Or is there another side to the story , another Jezebel who has, until now, remained hidden?This Jezebel is a young Phoenician princess who journeys to Israel to become Queen, and who fights against the power of the Temple on behalf of all the women of the land. This Jezebel is a free-spirited young woman raised to be loved and admired by men, a Queen who wants to free her people from the constraints of a religion dominated by priests. This Jezebel is the woman against whom Israel's greatest prophet, Elijah, fights for the very soul of the nation.

In this interpretive translation of the Five Scrolls, the variety and scope of the Bible is apparent, both as a religious text and as a work of great literature. In the Song of songs, the yearning for love is combined with a fine expression of eroticism, and the Book of Ruth is the great short story. Lamentation reveals the heartbreak of a prophetover the ultimate disaster of his people - the destruction of the Temple and of Jerusalem. Ecclesiastes is a philosophical treatise, bordering on cynicism, but still offering hope that, amidst the vanities and tears, youth, love, companionship and wisdom can still bring joy to human life. S for Esther, here is, surprisingly, a fantasy comedy.

Its momentum building, the “Jesus Movement” is unfolding, with Episcopalians longing to embody our branch of the movement in the world. John Newton’s contribution is this look at God’s reckless love. His aim is not for the head, but for the heart, to connect people with their passion and love for Jesus Christ, reawakening what may be dormant, because ultimately, it is not clever ideas but passion that mobilizes people. The Jesus Movement is not about our move toward God, but about a God who is for us in Christ Jesus, constantly moving toward fragile and broken humanity, recklessly loving us in all seasons and circumstances. Newton draws heavily from the gospels, and speaks to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Each chapter begins with a gospel passage used to challenge the way we think about God, love, morality, grace, mission, evangelism, and the church. Three discussion questions in each chapter and the book can be used as a 10-week study, with groups discussing two chapters at a time. Chapters are intentionally short, and each unpacks a specific episode in Jesus’s life that illuminates the reckless love of God in Christ.

Tradition has it that King Solomon knew everything there was to know -- the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself -- but what do we know of him? Esteemed biblical scholar Steven Weitzman reintroduces readers to Solomon's story and its surprising influence in shaping Western culture, and he also examines what Solomon's life, wisdom, and writings have come to mean for Jews, Christians, and Muslims over the past two thousand years. Weitzman's Solomon is populated by a colorful cast of ambitious characters -- Byzantine emperors, explorers, rabbis, saints, scientists, poets, archaeologists, trial judges, reggae singers, and moviemakers among them -- whose common goal is to unearth the truth about Solomon's life and wisdom. Filled with the Solomonic texts of the Bible, along with lesser known magical texts and other writings, this book challenges both religious and secular assumptions. Even as it seeks to tell the story of ancient Israel's greatest ruler, this insightful book is also a meditation on the Solomonic desire to know all of life's secrets, and on the role of this desire in world history--From publisher description

The idea and practice of sacrifice play a profound role in religion, ethics, and politics. In this brief work, philosopher Moshe Halbertal explores the meaning and implications of sacrifice, developing a theory of sacrifice, ritual, violence, and love.