In this chapter, we will examine the Old Testament’s role in religious communities as an authoritative revelation from God – the concept of “scripture” common to the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These texts hardly began as the books that now comprise the Bible; rather, what we will discover is a lengthy, complex development of authoritative texts from oral to written to canon.

This chapter will take us inside the ancient world of the Old Testament’s formation. Words, considered powerful, were painstakingly preserved through centuries in the hands of anonymous authors and editors, scribes and scholars. Texts were collected into books and went through a process of use and standardization by the ancient Israelites, beginning as early as the tenth century bceand lasting through the Babylonian exile and beyond – emerging finally in the canonical form we know today as the Old Testament.

In this final chapter, we will summarize the Old Testament and explore its lasting contributions to world history, society in general, and the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specifically, we will explore four particular aspects of the Old Testament and examine how each functions to create a cohesive and living whole.

This overview in turn will remind us that the Old Testament’s central message communicates, in a host of ways, what it perceives as Israel’s life in covenant relationship with God, obeying God’s Torah, and living morally and ethically in right relationship with other human beings. Within this overarching concern of the Old Testament, we have already observed the continual thread of a monotheistic worldview in process. The development toward the Old Testament’s conviction of the singularity of God is indeed among the most enduring contributions to human history.

Similarly, the Old Testament’s contribution to civil society cannot be underestimated. Thus, in conclusion, we will explore three core values in particular that are rooted, not in secularization as often is assumed, but in the rich and enduring legacy of the Old Testament.

The significance of the Old Testament for human history and culture is undeniable. Whatever our personal convictions regarding its content, the Old Testament contains the origins of nearly everything we think about God. Variously labeled as the Hebrew Bible, the Tanak, the First Testament, and the Old Testament, among others, this library of texts from ancient Israel has been preserved for more than two thousand years.

Emerging from the polytheistic context of the ancient world, the enduring significance of the Old Testament is to be found in the concept of monotheism. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share in this unique religious legacy. We will discover in this chapter what lies behind the terminology we use when we speak of monotheism, and how the Old Testament perceives and develops the understanding of a singular God. Known to ancient Israel as Yahweh, Israel’s God came to be understood as Creator, source of all, and sovereign over all. Only in time would Israel come to believe that Yahweh was not only its God, and the God Israelites were called to worship, but the one and only God.

This chapter examines the three foundational strands that shaped early Christianity and, in turn, western thought: Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, and Roman culture. It begins with Judaism, emphasizing its monotheism, prophetic self-criticism, and teleological view of history – features that deeply influenced Christian theology. The Book of Isaiah is central, offering themes of justice, suffering, and messianic hope later interpreted as prefiguring Christ. The chapter then turns to Hellenistic philosophy – especially, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism – which informed Christian ideas about the soul, virtue, and the good life. These schools stressed moral discipline and the pursuit of wisdom, values that Christianity absorbed and reinterpreted theologically. The Roman contribution centered on imperial power, civic virtue, and especially the Latin language, which became Christianity’s primary medium in the West. Roman thinkers like Cicero and Virgil helped transmit Greek ideas, emphasizing duty, eloquence, and destiny. These strands – Jewish, Greek, and Roman – were not seamlessly integrated, but their dynamic interaction laid the groundwork for a western intellectual tradition rooted in moral inquiry, historical depth, and a universalizing spiritual vision.

Leonard Cohen was born into a prominent and observant Jewish family. His maternal grandfather was a rabbi who lived with the family in his retirement and at whose knee Cohen studied. Cohen felt some estrangement from the Jewish community in which he was raised, as The Favourite Game suggests when it describes its protagonist as “suspect” among certain commercial Jews, and yet with Gentiles he “often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.” Despite his unwillingness to be the good Jewish son who follows his father into the family business and temple, Cohen always identified as Jewish. He was reluctant to talk about the religious aspects of his work, but it is hard to think of another popular songwriter who drew so explicitly on the Jewish tradition. The use he made of tradition was often not explicitly religious, transforming Biblical stories and images for secular purposes, while religious concerns often are expressed in modern, seemingly secular contexts. Several of Cohen’s songs, such as “If It Be Your Will” and “Who by Fire,” draw extensively from Jewish prayers. This chapter explores the influence of Judaism on Cohen’s work, and the expression that work gives to the experience of Judaism.

This chapter considers the fraught and complex history of religion and poetry in Australia, given the context of settler – colonialism, Aboriginal understandings of Country, and Australia’s growing cultural diversity. Discerning that anti-religious sentiment has emerged through a perception of Christianity as too close to settler – colonialism, it argues for a broad understanding of religion to include major world faiths and Aboriginal spirituality. It considers how nineteenth-century poets responded to the crises of faith brought about by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and then how poets grappled with meaning-making and value-making following the two world wars. At the same time, it recognises that many poets; including Francis Webb, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley; and Les Murray; still shared an institutional understanding of religion. The chapter considers how recent poets have meditated on the relationship between the secular and the sacred. It analyses the mosaic quality of Fay Zwicky’s reflections on her Jewish ancestry, as well as the navigation of Buddhism in poets like Harold Stewart, Robert Gray; and Judith Beveridge; Christianity in the work of Kevin Hart and Lachlan Brown; and Islam in the work of Omar Sakr.

The Hebrew Bible with its strident championing of the oppressed is frequently associated with the development of human rights. Renowned for its bold account of the emancipation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, its impact on the later beliefs in freedom and human dignity is immense. Yet is it appropriate to associate its laws with the origin of this principle, since the term itself (זכויות אדם in Hebrew) is absent in the Pentateuch – and where it is anachronistic to impose this post-Enlightenment concept on these ancient sources?

Religious groups outside of the Christian tradition have slowly been incorporated into American civil religion. The chapter discusses four major world religions and their inclusion in the religious landscape of the United States: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The chapter also explores some new religious movements with distinctly American origins, Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientism.

Origen’s examination of Jesus’s baptism in Against Celsus offers readers a particularly secure first footing for apprehending his sense of the Gospel narratives’ “mixed” character. That Jesus was baptized by John is hardly problematic, historically speaking. But the events narrated to have taken place directly after the baptism presented no less difficulty for readers in antiquity than they do for readers today. Origen preserves Celsus’s dismissal of the descent of the dove and voice from heaven as an obvious fiction. Origen, however, resists the judgment. Why? His reply to Celsus puts the whole complex of first principles detailed in Part I to work. According to Origen’s view, one can receive the narrative to be “true” inasmuch as it depicts, in figurative language drawn from prophetic literary tropes, Jesus’s own interior inspiration at the commencement of his public ministry. In short, the story narrates something real, something “historical” even, precisely insofar as it is entirely spiritual. The Evangelists then came to share in the same kind of vision Jesus is said to have had at his baptism and narrated “in figures” what they, too, had “perceived in their own understanding.”

This chapter surveys a range of engagements with religion in the modernist theatre, from T. S. Eliot’s vision for a new Christian drama to Bertolt Brecht’s fascination with the Bible, and from Sylvia Wynter’s staging of Afro-diasporic ritual practices to Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatisation of Buddhist legend. Such works, this chapter shows, tend to favour syncretic and heterodox expressions of religious subjects, frequently drawing together multiple doctrinal or ritual traditions within a single performance. These modern dramas of religion are examined across four sections: ‘Modernist Iconoclasms’, on dramatists who sought to dismantle religion’s influence; ‘Temples of a Living Art’, on artists who sought to remake theatre in the image of religion; ‘Ritual and Sacrifice’, on theatre and metaphysics; and ‘Allegories and Parables of Renewal’, on the intersection of religious allegory with social change. Throughout these sections, the chapter illustrates the plural and paradoxical roles for religion assigned on the modernist stage.

Schoenberg claimed to be the successor of Richard Wagner in the tradition of German and Austrian music culture. For this reason, he had to deal with the latter’s antisemitic nationalism throughout his life. For Schoenberg, on the other hand, Wagner was at the centre of his artistic concerns, which always retained its vitality. The chapter shows that Wagner is at the centre of Schoenberg’s compositional experiments in his early work around 1900. In 1910, Schoenberg uses Wagner’s ideas as a starting point to justify his radical expressionism. Around 1920, he takes Wagner to task for introducing the twelve- tone technique; and around 1930 he fights with Wagner for his right to a German culture. In this way, Wagner’s enduring fascination is put at the service of continually changing needs.

The chapter reconstructs the tortuous path of “Judeo-Christian Europe” from 1945 to the Vatican’s Nostra Aetate declaration of 1965. Contrary to Cold War America, where Judeo-Christian affinities accelerated the mutation of Jews into “white folks,” the concept was met with fierce resistance in postwar Europe. The founding fathers of European integration, for their part, did not invoke “Judeo-Christian values” to advocate unity: The phrase only gained popularity with the rise of post-1989 anti-immigrant populism. Yet for a network of Catholic and Protestant churchmen, the tragedy of the Holocaust required epochal rapprochement with Judaism. In French catholic intellectual circles, “Judeo-Christian Europe” also meant the Judeo-Christianization of the Holocaust: an appropriation of the crime which also elevated the Jew to the rank of proximate friend.

This chapter provides a detailed comparative overview of domestic religion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, setting out evidence of a range of domestic devotional activities as performed by households of different faiths, and introducing the legislation which, to varying extents, restricted the open religious expression of these different communities. It considers how larger domestic gatherings involving participants other than members of the household would have been restricted by legislation such as the Conventicle Acts (1664–89), as well as self-regulation within the recently established Jewish communities. This legislation or congregational law drew a distinction between household and family prayer and ‘gathering for worship’ in domestic spaces. The chapter suggests that domestic gatherings for worship were permitted in certain circumstances, and that these circumstances generally coincided with life-cycle events.