215 Book Review I The ‘Fifth Veda’ of Hinduism: Poetry, Philosophy and Devotion in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. By Ithamar Theodor. London: I. B. Tauris, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-78453-199-7. pp. x + 229. £64.00. Review by Re’em Stern, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Bar-Ilan I thamar Theodor’s recent publication brilliantly explores the construction of divine personhood in the ancient and popular Indian scripture Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), while highlighting its centrality within Hindu thought and praxis, particularly for Vaiṣṇava traditions. As Edwin Bryant succinctly notes in his epi- graph, Building on his work analyzing the narrative structure of the Bhagavad Gītā, Ithamar Theodor expertly argues that the combining of all the elements con- tained in the Bhāgavata was a conscious harmonizing of two distinct orthodox scholastic traditions: the philosophical one stemming from the Upaṇiṣads, and the literary aesthetical one drawing from the rasa [emotional experience, “taste”] theory of Kāvya poetics. This is a fascinating and groundbreaking work (ii ). Theodor commences his analysis by considering various notions of Personhood. The western term ‘person,’ he states, has a long history, dating back to the Greco- Roman period, with the Christian tradition adopting the term to designate the Trinity. This usage remained for centuries, but was later restricted to human individuals, and its application to the divine was taken to be anthropomorphic. A western imposition of the term on Indian culture has led early translators of