Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature and Culture.

• Author: Cox, Harvey
• Position: Book review

Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature and Culture. Edited by ROBERTA STERMAN SABBATH. Biblical Interpretation Series, vol. 98. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Pp. xxii + 534. $241.

In what some are calling a "secular age," what are we to make of the fact that we still have "sacred texts," and that hundreds of millions of people still seem to be influenced by them? How does one best read a sacred text'? What makes it sacred in the first place? Are we missing something when we read it merely as "literature" or as a cultural artifact? Does reading it in these "secular" ways intersect in any way with its religious significance?

Turning to the Tanakh (Hebrew scriptures), the New Testament, the Qur'an, and some other texts as well, some forty scholars have, in this pioneering collection, prepared a feast as delicious as it is informative. Their essays, ably introduced in an extensive general introduction, all build on the idea-whose-time-has-come that various theories in literary studies can not only enrich our understanding of these texts, but can deepen their spiritual significance as well. Another underlying theme is that these texts should not be isolated from one another, but that comparing them--allowing them to speak to one another--can illuminate all of them. In perusing these pages one wonders why this cross fertilization has not been going on for centuries. After all, some of the same figures, like Adam, Noah, and Abraham, appear in both the Tanakh and the Quran, and Mary and Jesus grace the pages of both the Quran and the New Testament. Of course, the Christian tradition of canonization has usually bound the Tanakh and the New Testament together (I say "usually" because copies of a free-standing New Testament, sometimes oddly including the Psalms, are widely distributed). But the Christian manner of binding these texts together is usually the result of the effort to find the promises and prophecies of the Tanakh fulfilled in the story of Jesus Christ. This volume, however, seeks to allow each text to stand on its own so that the dialogue with the other can proceed more effectively.

The ideas that inform this book are timely in part because they reflect the wider global situation in which the major religious traditions are meeting each other--in dialogue and in conflict--all over the world. This is, of course, both a blessing and a bane. Members of these traditions can be inspired by them to lives of compassion and...