A review by davehershey
Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths by Bruce Feiler

1.0

This book is rather popular, and is a quick read, but I found it rather blah. Feiler makes some interesting insights and speaks to intriguing people all in an effort to seek out the real Abraham in the hope that by looking to Abraham there can be some sort of religious peace between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. One major flaw was a lack of footnotes, which may be normal for popular level books, but is still a serious flaw. Feiler says the apostle Paul wrote the biblical book of Hebrews, a conclusion that is not widely held. There is scholarly dispute on who wrote Hebrews and most (maybe all) Bible translations even say that the writer is unknown. So Feiler makes a pretty obvious mistake that any person can go to any Bible and discover. A footnote would help say where he got his information. Is he ignorant of the anonymity and scholarly debate on Hebrews or does he just not care? This is a problem because when he talks about legends of Abraham in Islam, for example, how am I to know he got it right when he got something wrong that I do know about. It casts a suspicious light on much of what he writes.

So overall, it is not an awful book, perhaps it is even a good read to get a beginning understanding of the role of Abraham in religions. Its okay.