Carol Bakhos is Associate Professor of Late Antique Judaism at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In her lucid new book, [Bakhos] challenges the notion that the first patriarch can be so innocuously pressed into the service of interfaith reconciliation… She proves uniquely attuned to the interpretive richness with which each tradition fashioned and refashioned its own Abraham and, therefore, to the perils of detaching a pluralistic one-size-fits-all Abraham from the particular traditions that, for better or worse, have so enduringly granted him life and meaning. Alfred North Whitehead once quipped that the history of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. If Carol Bakhos is any guide, today’s contentious continuities and discontinuities among Jews, Christians, and Muslims may none too hopefully be said to be a footnote to Abraham.

Carol Bakhos is Associate Professor of Late Antique Judaism at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In her lucid new book, [Bakhos] challenges the notion that the first patriarch can be so innocuously pressed into the service of interfaith reconciliation… She proves uniquely attuned to the interpretive richness with which each tradition fashioned and refashioned its own Abraham and, therefore, to the perils of detaching a pluralistic one-size-fits-all Abraham from the particular traditions that, for better or worse, have so enduringly granted him life and meaning. Alfred North Whitehead once quipped that the history of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. If Carol Bakhos is any guide, today’s contentious continuities and discontinuities among Jews, Christians, and Muslims may none too hopefully be said to be a footnote to Abraham.

Carol Bakhos is Associate Professor of Late Antique Judaism at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In her lucid new book, [Bakhos] challenges the notion that the first patriarch can be so innocuously pressed into the service of interfaith reconciliation… She proves uniquely attuned to the interpretive richness with which each tradition fashioned and refashioned its own Abraham and, therefore, to the perils of detaching a pluralistic one-size-fits-all Abraham from the particular traditions that, for better or worse, have so enduringly granted him life and meaning. Alfred North Whitehead once quipped that the history of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. If Carol Bakhos is any guide, today’s contentious continuities and discontinuities among Jews, Christians, and Muslims may none too hopefully be said to be a footnote to Abraham.