REVIEWS 415

GUY G. STROUMSA:
The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity.
(Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions.) viii, 225 pp. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015. £66.50. ISBN 978 0 19 873886 2.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X16000288

This is an impressive book and is in a series which is obviously going to be essential

reading for anyone concerned with the so-called Abrahamic religions. Stroumsa
gathers here already published articles from disparate places, so it is useful to
have them all together, and they really hang together, since clearly he has been
engaged on a fairly consistent quest for the cultural flavour of Late Antiquity.
This is very much part of a major modern project, to understand the nature of
Late Antiquity and to use that understanding to know more about the environment
in which Islam appeared and then developed. This has actually been a longstanding
European project, and certainly not limited to understanding the prerequisites for
Islam. Why any religion suddenly appears and flourishes, and indeed sometimes
does the reverse, has for a long time interested people, and a variety of hypotheses
are presented. It is difficult to say anything plausible about this for modern religions,
where we know so much more about the historical context than is the case with the
past, and so how we are expected to say anything sensible about the origins of much
older religions defeats me. A lot of commentators tend to fall into a kind of
Hegelianism where the idea is that a religion poses solutions to problems which
then come up against new problems which call for new solutions, and so on.
This sort of explanation of religious change is useful in understanding the links be-
tween religions but not very helpful when discussing religious change. Some of the
thinkers discussed in the book seem to believe that people who live in the desert are
likely to be monotheists, presumably because the desert is just one thing, while more
clement environments are variegated and so encourage belief in polytheism. To call
this an argument is laughable. For one thing, for those who live in deserts the desert
is not one thing but an ever-changing landscape, one which they are able to under-
stand because they perceive its variety and are able to work with it. Many of the
other arguments are similarly implausible. The idea that the Middle East is the meet-
ing place of Byzantine, Sassanian, Jewish and Christian ideas, plus lots of others,
and that this proved to be fertile compost for the development of Islam, might con-
vince a horticulturist but need not persuade us. After all some remarkable religious
ideas seem to be have come from highly restricted environments, and many parts of
the world are rich combinations of different cultures. This Bulletin is published in
such a place, but I am not sure that we should take that to be an indication that a
major religious development is about to take place. Stroumsa reports on these the-
ories and it seems to me that there is scope here for being critical of many of them.
Where Stroumsa is more useful is when he does not speculate but describes the
cultural conditions of Late Antiquity, whether Jewish, Christian or classical. Here he
describes a range of arguments, ideas and theories that present a wide range of views
on religion, and many of these find echoes eventually in the Quran. The theory is
that rabbinic Judaism, patristic Christianity and early Islam are three aspects of
what he calls the Abrahamic movement. Each side stresses some aspect of
Abraham, and ignores others, and the aim is not so much to establish some doctrinal
consensus as to defend one interpretation as the exclusive version. One cannot help
wondering what this really has to do with Abraham, though, since a sort of imagin-
ary patriarch seems to rear over these different theories, having very little to do with

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 416 REVIEWS

any scriptural source. There are many stories about Abraham which certainly appear
in a variety of religions, but they often have a trajectory that has little to do with the
particular religion in which they figure. This is hardly surprising, it was ever thus,
yet I would appreciate an attempt being made not just to describe the differences and
similarities but also to evaluate them. Obviously it is not possible to judge which are
more accurate or otherwise, given what we can take objectively to be evidence. On
the other hand we can ask what concept of Abraham works better at supporting the
“constant ethical and spiritual renewal of religion” (p. 198) that Stroumsa sees as the
point of the whole exercise. Or perhaps it makes no difference? For example, the
Jewish Abraham both argues with God and also is prepared, apparently, to sacrifice
his son to Him. Muslim prophets tend to be much more obedient than Jewish pro-
phets, on the version of the scriptures we have of the latter. Is it better to have as a
spiritual guide someone prepared to disagree with God occasionally, or someone
never able to do this? What level of commitment to someone is involved in being
a friend, as Abraham is said to be, and what is it to be a friend of God, as compared
to a human being?
It may seem to a comparativist that asking these sorts of questions is to fail to
study religion objectively, but surely that is not the case. It is rather a matter of treat-
ing the arguments that religious thinkers use seriously and not just a matter of per-
sonal view. The distance between Athens and Jerusalem does not only represent the
gap between classical and religious thought, but also the division of logic and cul-
ture. It is because religious thinkers took themselves seriously as thinkers that logic
was important to them, and it should be important to us when we consider their
views.

Oliver Leaman
University of Kentucky

ADAM SILVERSTEIN and GUY STROUMSA (eds) with MOSHE BLIDSTEIN

(associate ed.):
The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions.
xvii, 617 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. £95.
ISBN 978 0 19 969776 2.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X1600029X

When I started reading this book I could not help wondering what the point of it is.
It is hard enough, one might think, to write about any one religion, but to talk about
three, and how they link up with each other, is a really tough prospect. I am not con-
vinced that it really works, but some of the chapters are very impressive and readers
will learn much from them. This review could easily be on just one of the chapters,
and all I can do here is present a survey and make some comments on the project as
a whole. There are 32 chapters and they are often very different. Some are factual
and descriptive, while others tend to pose questions to the reader. Many of them
are difficult and involve a great deal of prior knowledge.
It is divided up into sections: the first on the concept of the Abrahamic religions
themselves; the second on the various communities; the third on hermeneutics; the
fourth on religious thought, which seems to cover a vast variety of topics; the fifth
on rituals and ethics; and then there are epilogues, which in many ways embody the
problems with the volume as a whole, and I suspect the topic, which is vagueness.
The most disappointing section is the end. Peter Ochs throws in everything in his

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