Sacred Tropes ─ Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an As Literature and Culture

A range of approaches to literary theory are applied to the three sacred tests by scholars of literature, religion, history, sociology, and other disciplines. The essays are short and avoid specialist jargon so they can be used in classrooms to broaden the scope of sacred text interpretation. Among the topics are canticles and the problematic of spiritual metaphor, human-divine communication as a paradigm for power in the Qur'an, reading the annunciation in the Romantic rape tradition, the Book of Job and Shakespearean subjectivity, Isaac as the lamb of God, and Antonin Scalia versus Jonathan Edwards regarding Romans 13 and the American theology of state. The core essays were presented at a number of conferences. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Roberta Sabbath, Ph.D. (1994) Comparative Literature, University of California, Riverside, teaches in the English Department, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She focuses on Tanakh-inspired literary traditions, including her monograph-in-progress, Re-Membering the Body: Figurative Readings of the Jewish Sense of Wonder.