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This introductory chapter provides an overview of Kabbalah. A Hebrew term one can render as “tradition” or “reception.” Kabbalah referred to a mode of reading, a library of texts, a series of concepts, and a range of practices. As a mode of reading, Kabbalah encompassed a set of interpretive assumptions adopted by an initiate in the course of approaching a sacred text. Kabbalists assiduously applied these methods of exegesis to the most sacred of texts, the Bible, and relied on mystical symbolism to uncover its theological content. The term Kabbalah also encompassed a series of ritual practices. For the religious adept, however, Kabbalah also referred to something beyond these rituals of practice, modes of exegesis, bodies of literature, and new theological concepts. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the term Kabbalah referred to a putative tradition of esotericism, to secrets that God had revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai.

A text may be regarded as sacred by virtue of its origin or function in the community of faith. In recognising the plurality of sacred texts, maintaining a commitment to any one should not require the dismissal of all the others. One does not have to establish simple binary oppositions between them to display a loyalty to one's own faith. The discussion argues that this may be the major religious challenge of the 21st century — to find ways of affirming the presence and activity of God in other faiths, without losing a sense of the distinctiveness and value of one's own. This task has a political urgency particularly with Christianity and Islam, since more than half of the world's population is under these religions. The chapter concludes that the task of interpreting sacred texts is an unsettled, evolving, and unavoidable responsibility of the faith community.

This chapter analyses the very particular language of the Bible translation and accounts for it in social terms. In Alexandria it was desirable to be Greek, not Egyptian. But the Jewish community adapted to the colonial language in a very particular way: koine Greek was shaped by the translators so as to make it possible both to ‘go Greek’ and to ‘stay Jewish’. They had to serve both the requirements of public reading in the synagogue and the needs of education. Their seemingly artless and ‘literal’ translation technique, oriented more towards the source than the target language, made a connection for readers, and above all for hearers, with the traditional language of the Jewish ethnos, Biblical Hebrew. It is shown how many of the distinctive linguistic features of the translations achieved this end. The auditory impact of the Greek versions plays an important part. With limited variation and development, this translation language continued in operation through successive waves of translation activity, and it was also deployed in original works that were written by Jews during the Hellenistic and Roman periods which are now part of the Christian Septuagint corpus. Semantic innovation, the coinage of new word and expressions or of new meanings for familiar words, is a hallmark of this Septuagint language. Far from being a mere series of solutions to challenges of translation, this vocabulary represents the translators' intensely creative way of melding and contemporizing their different thought worlds.

This book examines compositional practices, historical developments, and passages that reveal the way the creators of the Babylonian Talmud (or Bavli) conceived themselves. It complements the continuous creative revision with a freezing of tradition and its containment in a way that produces discontinuity; it complements the fusing of horizons with a literary design that foregrounds one horizon from another. Part I of the book explores the Talmud's literary practice through a close analysis of selected passages, or sugyot. Part II focuses on the Talmud's creators‘ rhetoric of self-presentation and self-definition, arguing that they defined themselves in opposition to those who focused on the transmission of tradition, and that the opposition and hierarchy they created between scholars and transmitters allows us both to understand better the way they conceived of their project as well as to see this project as part of a debate about sacred texts within the Jewish community and more broadly in late ancient Mesopotamia.

This chapter looks at a few examples that illustrate the lack of centralization which characterizes women's religions. Among the Black Caribs no one tries to compel conformity in beliefs about the dead. A number of the non-centralized women's religions are situated in societies in which men's religions are highly centralized. The clearest examples are the women's religions that coexist with Catholicism or Buddhism. This chapter looks at the Shakers at some length because they present a more complex case than the previous examples. Two women's religions do not fit neatly into the pattern of non-centralized authority: the Okinawan religion and Christian Science. With the exception of Christian Science, women's religions are characterized both by an aversion to centralization and a lack of authoritative sacred texts. At first glance, it would seem that rank and centralization should go hand in hand because both reflect status—conscious, classificatory, and dichotomous thinking. Yet there exist in women's religions highly articulated internal systems of rank co-existing with an almost total lack of centralized authorities.

This chapter serves as a conclusion to Goswami's thesis, which he failed to finish before he died. The discussion immediately starts with the nature of prema, or Love, and shows how the concepts of bhakti and bhakta are related to the factors and events that surrounded Goswami's death. Next, it reviews Goswami's conception of the word theology and tries to determine if there is a present “theology” of the Chaitanya School. It also examines the three manifestations of the loving divinity and the three foundational sacred texts and the ultimate theological focal point of ISKCON. The living theology of the Krishna movement and the concepts of Gita and Krishna are also examined.

Some faith-based social service programs incorporate specifically religious content, intended to expose beneficiaries to religious resources, messages, or activities. Religious program elements include religious references in program self-descriptions, religious objects in the program environment, invitations to religious activities, prayer, use of sacred texts, worship, sharing of personal testimonies, religious teachings, and invitations to a personal faith commitment (proselytizing). Seven variables further describe the style or format of these religious elements, particularly whether they are mandatory, and how they are structured into the program methodology. From this follows five general strategies for incorporating a religious dimension into social services: implicit, invitational, relational, integrated-optional, and mandatory.

This chapter starts the analysis of the actual data concerning Indo-Aryan origins. By the mid-nineteenth century, one of the few things regarding the homeland that Western Indo-European scholars did agree on was that it could not have been India; wherever the original homeland might have been the Indo-Aryans at least must have come to the subcontinent from outside. While not the slightest bit concerned with the homeland obsession of European scholars in general, Indigenous Aryanists soon reacted to the corollary of the problem when it impinged on the origins of their own culture; it seemed unacceptable to consider that such an enormously speculative and seemingly inconclusive European undertaking should be entitled to make authoritative pronouncements on the early history of the Indian subcontinent. The first voices of opposition that attempted to utilize critical scholarship to counter the claim that the forefathers of the Vedic Indians hailed from outside the subcontinent are introduced. The initial objections concerned the philological evidence that had been brought forward as decisive by Western philologists. Since philology was a discipline that resonated with their own traditional Śruti epistemologies, and since it focused on texts in their own ancient language, Vedic Sanskrit, the philological evidence was the most easily accessible to Indigenous Aryan scrutiny; moreover, these texts that were suddenly of such interest to Western scholars happened to be their sacred ones and this fueled their concern.

The two major classics of the Taoist tradition, the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi, are philosophical writings from about 300 bce that contain a rich store of ancient wisdom They are not at all alike. The Daode jing, a collection of proverbs, aphorisms, and traditional sayings, is very short and rather mysterious in its often elliptic and enigmatic verses. The Zhuangzi is a compendium of prose that includes stories, fables, and parables in happy imitation of a footloose Taoist lifestyle. Yet combined, the two texts contain the essence of the Taoist mystical tradition and, over the centuries, have stood at the center of Taoist beliefs and practices, adapted and reinterpreted ever anew in light of contemporaneous concerns and sectarian preferences. This chapter examines the two texts and their development in the Chinese middle ages. It first presents a detailed description of the texts; then, proceeding in pairs, looks at two major commentaries from the early centuries ce and at the use of the classics in sectarian Taoist practices of the 4th and 5th centuries. Finally, the chapter focuses on their reinterpretation under Buddhist impact during the Tang dynasty (618–906). It shows how the tradition remains true to its original sources without ever giving up its flexibility or strength to serve the needs of later generations. It also documents the continuing importance of ancient sacred texts in the practical efforts of living Taoist mystics.

This chapter introduces the connection between the sacred text and the devotional body in medieval Japan. It notes that the main focus of the book is on Buddhist texts, and stresses the importance of paying close attention to the language of the sutras, or the textual culture. The chapter then discusses the setsuwa, which serves as the main source of information on Buddhist textual culture in medieval Japan, and also examines miracles, literary Buddhism, the South Asian and Chinese forms of the sutras, and the definition of the term “medieval.”

Chapter 7 addresses female sadhus’ sacred text practices. The chapter discusses “textual” performances centered on recitation of the Râmcaritmânas. A vernacular-language text composed by the medieval poet-saint Tulsidas, and embedded within the broader Râmâyan epic narrative tradition, the Râmcaritmânas presents an important genre of performance in the sadhus’ rhetoric of renunciation. The chapter also examines the strategies by which female sadhus construct themselves as “scriptural”—that is, how they perform a relationship with the literate textual tradition of Tulsidas’ Râmcaritmânas. It looks at their ideas of the text and their adaptations of that idea in performance, and just as significant, argues that the performing of “texts” confers power, authority, and legitimation for female sadhus in asceticism as practiced. The chapter further suggests that in the performing of texts female sadhus draw out and rework concepts that underscore a perspective of asceticism as relational and emplaced in community.

The sacred texts the Bible and the Qur'ān are not treatises of theological ethics, or even manuals of behavior, but Christians and Muslims have long mined them for their ethical ore. This chapter discusses sources, methods, and social values in theological ethics. For Christians and Muslims alike, the bedrock of religiously acceptable behavior is to be found in sacred scripture. Theological ethics, also known to some Christians as moral theology, argues that merely understanding instinctively or rationally that one ought to do or avoid actions perceived to be inherently good or evil is inadequate. Theological ethics needs to be distinguished clearly from other varieties of ethical thinking. Both Christian and Islamic ethical traditions enshrine a host of important personal and social ethical concerns. Among the larger-scale issues, both traditions have attended in varying degrees to matters of race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the environment and stewardship of creation, social justice, economic equity, slavery, human rights, and war and peace.

This chapter looks at Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aron, a masterpiece that, moving between music and text, purports to explore the relation of the Absolute as idea to the image that is alleged to manifest it. The complex tensions between idea and image are brought forward through an innovative combination of speech, vocal, and instrumental music known as Schoenberg's “theosonics”. The complex of questions posed and suspended by the Mosaic traditions of phenomenality and ideality, as manifested in the calf and the tablets, returns in Schoenberg's work as spectral re-enactments of older Jewish and Christian traditions exemplified in the comments on Moses in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and in the brief remarks on Moses in Augustine's Confessions. The chapter then considers a rabbinic tradition that contends that sacred food must be segregated from sacred text and that each confers sacred defilement, a “defiling of the hands”.

The binding metaphor for this book is yajña, the ancient Vedic ritual of sacrifice. The preliminary act of that event was called kṣetropadhāna, the measuring of the field. This introductory chapter measures out the field for the remainder of the book, setting the boundaries and laying the groundwork. It begins by introducing the genre of mythological texts known as the purāṇas. This is followed by a brief description of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa itself, which is the main source of narratives for these week-long performances. Next, the concept of the seven-day performance is introduced, with a description of an idealized saptāha probably dating from the early eighteenth century. This is followed by an outline of contemporary practice and an overview of scholarly writing on the subject. The chapter then describes how the Bhāgavata-saptāha fits in with other forms of oral performance of sacred texts in India. It concludes with a rationale for the work as a whole, an outline of the theoretical framework, and an overview of the contents of the following chapters.

In this chapter, Daya Krishna raises questions about the valorized status of sacred texts in the Indian tradition by documenting several serious hermeneutical disputes that occurred between the different schools regarding textual interpretations. In particular, Krishna explores the question of whether the doctrine of arthavāda is compatible with the idea of śruti. He provocatively expands the notion of an authoritative text beyond its typically religious borders and argues that one needs to make space for a “secular” śruti alongside its “sacred” counterpart. With both accorded the status of “śruti,” Krishna proceeds to demonstrate that in the end it is not the textual source from which knowledge emerges that gives it its authority, but rather the attitudes of those readers who interpret and in this sense coauthor the texts.