As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas—it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing the ways in which the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals the ways in which religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin—or even simply the word “naked”—to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, A Brief History of Nakedness surveys the touching, sometimes tragic and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies.

In order to assess the purpose and function of the incest narratives in the Pentateuch and the incest prohibitions of Leviticus 18, McClenney-Sadler's book offers a formal examination of ancient Israelite kniship terminology. According to anthropologists, only through a formal analysis of kin terms can incest prohibitions be properly understood. A "formal" analysis of kinship terms is a method employed ny ethnographers to compare the kinship system of any given society with one of the six conventionally recognized kinship systems worldwide. There are very specific culturally patterned and expected behaviors that every society adopts in relation to post-marital residence, rules of descent, kinship terminology and incest prohibitions. These patterns are socially conditioned and eventually produce either of the six knishp systems. A close reading of the biblical textual evidence in light of Syro-Palestinian archaeology allows ut to conclude that the kinship system of ancient Israel was Normal Hawaiian. Furthermore, the internal logic and structure of Leviticus 18 becomes clear once we recognize that descent is not biological but jural in nature. Reading Leviticus 18 with this idea in view, we find that a Normal Hawaiian kinship system is reflected in both the Genesis incest narratives and the jual-legal form of Leviticus 18. A hierarchy of kinship becomes transparent in the form and structure of Leviticus 18. In particular, we see in this form that wives and mothers were treated as heads of family in biblical law and endowed with spousal and parental rights and authority over every other family member, not only in incest laws, but in all matters. The jural authority of mothers and wives is structurally represented as second only to that of Yahweh.

Winner of the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region. The Clothes of Nakedness cleverly examines the complexities of human relationships, offering a gritty expose of the divide between rich and poor in modern Ghana. Evil lurks in the streets of Accra and it goes by the name of Mystique Mysterious. A wealthy man with maleficent intentions, Mystique delights in manipulating the vulnerable with his exploitative deals. His bargains may seem fishy but when poverty is knocking on your door and options are limited, what choice do you have? The Clothes of Nakedness is a gripping exploration into how, when pushed, ordinary people can fall into a vicious cycle of vice and corruption that only serves to benefit the ruling class.

Barbara Górnicka presents a sociological investigation – both historical and contemporary – into the problems surrounding naked bodies. She draws on her own participation in a nudist swimming club and goes on to study the often very complex and paradoxical emotions that have been associated with nakedness in the Western world for centuries. The book provides answers not only to why we find exposing our naked bodies shameful, but also why we find it sexual and erotic in the first place. It looks beneath taboos surrounding nakedness today and offers a theoretical explanation for their development over time. On the basis of her historical analysis, the author demonstrates that it was not until the late nineteenth or twentieth century that we began to see nudity as erotic.

This is a prose English and very literal translation of the first five books of the Old Testament (The Torah). Aramaic was the language of Jesus and of 1st century Israel. The Peshitta Bible is the world's first entire Christian Bible. The Peshitta Old Testament is itself a translation of the Hebrew Bible completed in the 1st century AD, according to the available evidence. No Peshitta scholar places the Peshitta OT later than the 2nd century AD. As such, it gives an early look at the state of the Hebrew Bible at that time, since Aramaic and Hebrew are sister Semitic languages and about as close to each other as any two languages can be, sharing the same alphabet, writing, grammar, much vocabulary and even similar pronunciation of many words. Some of the original Old Testament is Aramaic, such as Daniel chapters 2 through 7 inclusive, and Ezra 4 through much of 7. It even appears in a verse of Genesis 31 and one verse in Jeremiah 10:11. 228 pages, hardback.