Taking the basic texts of the three related and competitive religious systems we call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and has juxtaposed them in a topical and parallel arrangement according to the issues that most concerned all these children of Abraham. The hardcover edition of the work is bound in one volume and in the paperback version the identical material is broken down into three smaller but self-contained books. The second The Word and the Law and the People of God discusses the scriptures of the three faiths in various contexts, exegetical and legal. Throughout the work we hear an amazing variety of voices, some familiar, some not, all of them central to the primary and secondary canons of their own tradition: alongside the Scriptural voice of God are the words of theologians, priests, visionaries, lawyers, rulers and the ruled. The work ends, as does the same author's now classic Children of Abraham, in what Peters calls the classical period that is, before the great movements of modernism and reform that were to transform Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.