As with any work covering such a wide variety of texts over so broad a sweep of time, from Ancient Egypt through to contemporary Jewish—Christian dialogue, I have only been able to engage superficially with contentious issues. It is also not possible to be competent, let alone expert, in so many different areas. However, only a cursory discussion of these areas would have enabled me to take forward the line of argument I offer in the following pages. Furthermore, because of space constraints