Brooke (biblical criticism and exegesis, U. of Manchester, UK), Najman (religion, U. of Toronto, Canada), and Stuckenbruck (biblical studies, U. of Durham, UK) present 16 papers from a July 2007 conference that they thought would revolve around the giving of the Torah at Sinai as the normative paradigm for subsequent revelation in Judaism and Christianity; to their surprise, the conference instead dealt primarily with the ways in which Sinai was relativized to other examples of revelation in the history of ancient Judaism and beyond. Among the topics discussed are the ways Deuteronomy recasts its source material to de-emphasize Sinai; evidence from the Qumran scrolls of rites intended to summon the divine glory revealed at Sinai; the mixture of community identity, political and cultural contexts, and eschatology, alongside Sinai and scriptural traditions in shaping the ethics of the Qumran community; understandings of the Sinai event in the writings of Josephus; relative privileging of the auditory versus the visual experience of Sinai in Rabbinical interpretations; and representations of Sinai in Jewish and Christian art and architecture. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)