Studying Abrahamic Traditions: A Textual and Analytical Workbook

Understanding the Abrahamic traditions at any depth requires engagement with their primary texts and with the scholarly frameworks used to analyze them — not just summaries of what each tradition believes. This workbook course builds the specific analytical skills of religious studies: close reading of primary texts, comparative structural analysis, and systematic comparison of how three traditions address the same question. By the end of this course you will be able to read and analyze excerpts from the Tanakh, New Testament, and Quran using critical scholarly methods, apply comparative analytical frameworks to identify similarities and differences across traditions, and write structured comparative analyses of specific theological or ethical themes. What you will learn: - Close-reading methods for religious texts: how to identify genre, audience, historical context, and rhetorical strategy in a scriptural passage - Analyzing creation narratives: side-by-side reading of Genesis, the Gospel of John's prologue, and Quranic creation accounts — with a guided comparison worksheet - Analyzing prophetic texts: how prophetic speech functions in Hebrew Bible, Christian Old Testament interpretation, and the Quran - Comparative prayer analysis: the Shema, the Lord's Prayer, and Al-Fatiha as windows into each tradition's conception of God and the human-divine relationship - Analyzing covenant and law: the Mosaic covenant, the New Covenant in Christian theology, and the concept of covenant (mithaq) in Islam - Afterlife and eschatology: comparing the development of afterlife beliefs across all three traditions using primary text excerpts - Comparative essay template: a structured format for writing a 500-word comparative analysis of a shared theme across two or three traditions - Source analysis: how to distinguish between a primary text, a commentary, and a secondary scholarly source, and what each contributes to analysis Each chapter provides a primary-source excerpt with contextual notes, a structured reading guide with questions, a comparative template, and a worked example. Blank templates are provided for your own analyses. This course is suitable for students who have a basic knowledge of the Abrahamic traditions and want to develop genuine textual and analytical skills. No prior religious studies methodology is required, but some familiarity with the three traditions from introductory reading will be helpful.