Understanding the Pentateuch as A Scripture

Understanding the Pentateuch as a Scripture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) applies my research on iconic books and comparative scriptures to the study of the Pentateuch/Torah, the first five books of Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Contents:

1. RITUALIZED TEXT: The Pentateuch as a Scripture

2. TEXTUAL RHETORIC: The Persuasive Shaping of the Pentateuch

3. SCROLL, TABLET, AND CODEX: Ritualizing the Pentateuch’s Iconic Dimension

4. READING, PERFORMANCE, AND ART: Ritualizing the Pentateuch’s Performative Dimension

5. TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION: Ritualizing the Pentateuch’s Semantic Dimension

6. SCRIPTURES: From Torah to Bible

Postscripts issue on Sensing Sacred Texts

Postscripts: the Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds has published a special issue on Sensing Sacred Texts. The contents are:

"What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts: The Aesthetic Dimension of Scripture"
        by S. Brent Plate

"How the Bible Feels: The Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object"
        by Dorina Miller Parmenter

"Engaging All the Senses: On Multi-sensory Stimulation in the Process of Making and Inaugurating a Torah Scroll"
by Marianne Schleicher

"On Instant Scripture and Proximal Texts: Some Insights into the Sensual Materiality of Texts and their Ritual Roles in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond"
by Christian Frevel

"Touching Books, Touching Art: Tactile Dimensions of Sacred Books in the Medieval West"
by David Ganz

"Infusions and Fumigations: Literacy Ideologies and Therapeutic Aspects of the Qurʾan"
        by Katharina Wilkens

"Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts"
by Cathy Cantwell

"Neo-Confucian Sensory Readings of Scriptures: The Reading Methods of Chu Hsi and Yi Hwang"
        by Yohan Yoo

"Scriptures' Indexical Touch"
by James W. Watts