"Lively... points out that the conflict between the worship of many gods and the worship of one true god never disappeared." --Publishers Weekly

"Jonathan Kirsch has written another blockbuster about the Bible and its world." --David Noel Freedman, Editor-in-Chief of the Anchor Bible Project

"Kirsch tackles the central issue bedeviling the world today - religious intolerance... A timely book, well-written and researched." --Leonard Shlain, author of The Alphabet and the Goddess and Sex, Time and Power

"An intriguing read." --The Jerusalem...

Lawgiver and liberator. Seer and prophet. The only human permitted to converse with God "face-to-face." Moses is the most commanding presence in the Old Testament. Yet as Jonathan Kirsch shows in this brilliant, stunningly original volume, Moses was also an enigmatic and mysterious figure--at once a good shepherd and a ruthless warrior, a spiritual leader and a magician, a lawgiver who broke his own laws, God's chosen friend and hounded victim. Now, in Moses: A Life, Kirsch accomplishes the wondrous feat of revealing the real Moses, a strikingly modern figure who steps out from behind the...

"The stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder. . . ."

Sex. Violence. Scandal. These are words we rarely associate with the sacred text of the Bible. Yet in this brilliant book, Jonathan Kirsch recounts shocking tales that have been suppressed by religious authorities throughout history. Kirsch places each story within the political and social context of its time,...

David, King of the Jews, possessed every flaw and failing of which a mortal is capable, yet men and women adored him, and God showered him with many blessings. A charismatic leader, exalted as -a man after God's own heart, - he was also capable of deep cunning and bloodthirsty violence. Weaving together biblical texts with centuries of interpretation and commentary, as well as the startling discoveries of modern biblical archaeology and scholarship, bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch brings King David to life with extraordinary freshness, intimacy, and vividness of detail, revealing him in...

This work traces the history of the Sephardic Jews from their golden age to their post-Columbian diaspora. It highlights achievements in science, medicine, philosophy, arts, and economy alongside a few less noble accomplishments, in both the land they left behind and in the lands that they settled later.

The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by nationally bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch is a provocative popular history of the Inquisition, the 12^th century reign of church-sanctioned terror. Ranging from the Knights Templar to the first Protestants, from Joan of Arc to Galileo, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual is a fascinating and sobering study of the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of "heretics" in God's name--the original blueprints for persecution originally drafted in the Middle Ages but followed for centuries afterwards, up to and including the "advanced...

On the morning of November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a desperate seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a Nazi diplomat. Two days later vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited the murder to unleash Kristallnacht in a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Hitler himself. But was Grynszpan a crazed lone gunman or agent provocateur of the Gestapo? Was he motivated by a desire to avenge Jewish people, or did his act of violence speak to an intimate connection between the...