Sacred Texts: Home

"What is sacred? How do we extract meaning from sacred texts? Where do religious stories come from? How are these stories relevant to people today? The resources in this site will allow you to investigate all these questions and more." Explore the Library's Interactives.

Explanations are provided for the various approaches to interpret and analyse the Bible. Find information on rhetorical analysis, sociological approach, approach through recourse to Jewish traditions of interpretation and the feminist approach, to name a few.

"The Bible is a book that Jews and Christians consider sacred. The faithful believe it is a collection of God's messages and instructions for his people, written down by individuals under divine influence. The content was originally passed down orally and was transcribed many years after the events described had occurred. "

"3 Pope Benedict XVI referred to a world that often feels that God is “superfluous or extraneous” (Introduction, par. 2). He continues (Verbum Domini, par. 2): “There is no greater priority than this: to enable the people of our time once more to encounter God, the God who speaks to us and shares ... love so that we might have life in abundance.” The question is how to do so, whether for a Roman Catholic biblical scholar or for any of us who is concerned religiously. Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (par. 35; see also pars. 36 and 40; note also Dei Verbum, par. 12) recommends to Scripture scholars: “the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use.”

English translation of the entire Tanakh (Tanach) with Rashi's commentary. This Hebrew Bible was edited by esteemed translator and scholar, Rabbi A.J. Rosenberg.

Click through Harvard's Religious Literacy Project on Judaism. Explore chapters on: God - Biblical Monotheism, Torah, Covenant and Constitution and more.

"The Torah (Hebrew for "teaching") refers to the sacred scripture of the Jewish people as well as the scroll it is written on, their most identifiable physical symbol. The word has several meanings. Strictly speaking, it refers to the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). The entire text is said to have been dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai; these are the books contained in the Torah scroll that Jews read aloud in synagogues on the Sabbath and festivals."

"Tanakh, an acronym derived from the names of the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: Torah (Instruction, or Law, also called the Pentateuch), Neviʾim (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings)."

"The article investigates how God was revealed as father-mother in Islam and the Qur'an. It relates the similarities between the Islamic thinking about God and the Christian conception of God as Father. It presents a prophetic hadith which likens God's relationship to human beings to a mother's relationship to her nursing infant. It provides an overview of the mother motif in Islam. It discusses the parallel between the God-revealed-as-father in the parable in the book of Luke of the Bible and the Divine revealed in Islam."

Morgan Freeman meets a man who felt God's presence; learning how Muslims hear God's voice in the Quran; a tribe whose members believe they can channel divine healing power; a physicist with faith that science will lead him to God.

"THE QUR'AN, the most recent of the major sacred scriptures, originated in the northwestern half of the Arabian peninsula during the first quarter of the seventh century when it was proclaimed by Muhammad. The Quran reveals a significant relationship to the tradition of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and echoes themes found in their midrashic and apocryphal writings."

"Many Muslims recite the Fātiḥah as part of their prayers every day. According to a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, this surah contains the essence of the teachings of the Quran. The word for God in Arabic is “Allah,” which is the same word used by Arabic-speaking Christians to refer to God."

"The acceptance of the Koran as the word of God suggests that the so-called historical and textual study of the Koran is tantamount to questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ, as some people in the West have claimed. The rules of biblical criticism do not apply to the Koran as God’s revelation, because what corresponds to the Bible is the hadith collection, which comprises the words and deeds of the Prophet of Islam as the Bible comprises the words and deeds of Jesus Christ ... "