In this collection, scholars from diverse geographical locations revisit a cluster of five biblical texts: Ruth, Song of Songs, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), Lamentations and Esther. The volume presents various viewpoints and contexts-geographical, communal, religious, social, economical and ethical. Matching scholarship with social awareness, the contributors keep asking themselves and their readers a dual-faced question: how does our life context influence our scholarly and non-scholarly readings of the Bible, and how does reading the Bible critically influence our life? To answer this question and to show it at work the contributors employ a range of contextual lenses. Geography is a major factor of the contributors' contexts - with contributors from South Africa, Argentina, Israel, the Pacific Islands - but not the only one to influence their readings. Issues of society, culture and community are at the foreground for all contributors and their reading agendas with specific focus on the AIDs crisis in Africa, issues of migration and asylum, and feminist approaches to biblical texts.

Biblical humor about women and gender remains elusive for many readers, for its recognition may imply the realization that itGCOs a cruel and disrespectful humor, ridicule rather than good-natured fun. But viewing humor as social critique, as is largely done in the essays in this volume, with respect to both the texts read and their actual or implied author, may be fun as well as significant for understanding the biblical worlds. As most of the essays show, writing about women is writing about men as well. In other words, it is writing about gender roles. The critique of women, womanhood and femaleness implied by biblical and related texts serves, in equal measure, as a critique of men, manhood and maleness in the texts, of the texts authors, and of the textsGCO commentators and readers. Contributors include Scott Spencer, Mary Shields, Kathleen OGCOConnor, Toni Craven, Kathy Williams, Athalya Brenner, Gale Yee, Amy-Jill Levine, and Esther Fuchs.

This volume brings together disparate views about biblical texts in the books of Samuel, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah and examines their influence in the life of contemporary communities, demonstrating how today's environments and disorders help readers to acquire new insights into such texts. The contributing scholars hail from different continents - from East Asia to the United States to Europe to South Africa and Israel - and count themselves as members of various Jewish and Christian traditions or secularist ways of life. But, in spite of their differences in location and community membership, and perhaps in the spirit of the times (2020 and its global discontents), they share preoccupations with questions of ethics in politics and life, 'proper' death, violence and social exclusion or inclusion. This volume offers readers a better understanding of how politics and faith can be melded, both in ancient and contemporary contexts, to serve the interests of certain classes and societies, often at the expense of others.

A Feminist Companion to Tobit and Judith extends the work of the hugely influential and respected Feminist Companion series, which continues to set the standard for feminist approaches to the Hebrew Bible and related texts. In the present volume Athalya Brenner-Idan (with Helen Efthimiadis-Keith) draws together a range of scholarly commentators and addresses the core issues relating to feminist interpretations of the two texts at hand. The volume examines attitudes to gender, identities, exile, social mores, beliefs, clothing, food and drink, personal relationships, and biblical reception. The contributors are: Beverly Bow and George Nickelsburg, Athalya Brenner-Idan, Ora Brison, Helen Efthimiadis-Keith, Renate Egger-Wenzel, Beate Ego, Emma England, Jennifer Glancy, Jan Willem van Henten, Naomi Jacobs, Amy-Jill Levine, Pamela Milne, and Barbara Schmitz.

2021 Catholic Media Association Award third place award in academic studies Qoheleth, also called Ecclesiastes, has been bad news for women throughout history. In this commentary Lisa Wolfe offers intriguing new possibilities for feminist interpretation of the book's parts, including Qoheleth's most offensive passages, and as a whole. Throughout her interpretation, Wolfe explores multiple connections between this book and women of all times, from investigating how the verbs in the time poem in 3:1-8 may relate to biblical and contemporary women alike, to noting that if 11:1 indicates ancient beer making it thus reveals the women who made the beer itself. In the end, Wolfe argues that, by struggling with the perplexing text of Qoheleth, we may discover fruitful, against-the-grain reading strategies for our own time.

This volume brings together disparate views about biblical texts in the books of Samuel, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah and examines their influence in the life of contemporary communities, demonstrating how today's environments and disorders help readers to acquire new insights into such texts. The contributing scholars hail from different continents - from East Asia to the United States to Europe to South Africa and Israel - and count themselves as members of various Jewish and Christian traditions or secularist ways of life. But, in spite of their differences in location and community membership, and perhaps in the spirit of the times (2020 and its global discontents), they share preoccupations with questions of ethics in politics and life, 'proper' death, violence and social exclusion or inclusion. This volume offers readers a better understanding of how politics and faith can be melded, both in ancient and contemporary contexts, to serve the interests of certain classes and societies, often at the expense of others.

In this volume scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations are gathered together to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light, focusing on issues of intertextuality. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles I sheds light from new perspectives on themes in these so-called historical books including Asian American and Chinese readings, issues of land, genealogy and maleness. The authors challenge us to consider how we deal with cultural distances between ourselves and these ancient writings - and between one another in the contemporary world. These goal of these essays is de-centre the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open to up new possibilities for discovery of meaning and method.

In this volume scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations are gathered together to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light, focusing on issues of intertextuality. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles I sheds light from new perspectives on themes in these so-called historical books including Asian American and Chinese readings, issues of land, genealogy and maleness. The authors challenge us to consider how we deal with cultural distances between ourselves and these ancient writings - and between one another in the contemporary world. These goal of these essays is de-centre the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open to up new possibilities for discovery of meaning and method.

The format of the new The Bible in the 21st Century series reflects an international dialogue between experts and graduate students. In this book, experts on Bible translations present essays on the practices of translating the Bible for the present and the future, through Christian and Jewish approaches, in Western Europe and North America as well as in the former Eastern Bloc and in Africa. Each paper is paired with a response. The international contributors here include Adele Berlin, John Rogerson, Robert Carroll, Mary Phil Korsak, Everett Fox, Jeremy Punt and Athalya Brenner, and the debate is prefaced with an introduction by the Editors.>

The authoritative status of 'Prophecy' in the Bible poses a challenge to the feminist readers. This challenge is sharpened by the widespread symbolism in prophetic discourse of woman, wife, mother, harlot and the use of what the volume call 'pornoprophetics'. In this collection it is the book of Hosea that attracts special attention, but there are also articles on sexual violence and an introductory essay on prophecy itself as a literary phenomenon. This Feminist Companion offers a sharp confrontation between the voice of the prophetic male and the resistance of the feminist reader.

Biblical humor about women and gender remains elusive for many readers, for its recognition may imply the realization that it's a cruel and disrespectful humor, ridicule rather than good-natured fun. But viewing humor as social critique, as is largely done in the essays in this volume, with respect to both the texts read and their actual or implied author, may be fun as well as significant for understanding the biblical worlds. As most of the essays show, writing about women is writing about men as well. In other words, it is writing about gender roles. The critique of women, womanhood and femaleness implied by biblical and related texts serves, in equal measure, as a critique of men, manhood and maleness in the texts, of the texts authors, and of the texts' commentators and readers. Contributors include Scott Spencer, Mary Shields, Kathleen O'Connor, Toni Craven, Kathy Williams, Athalya Brenner, Gale Yee, Amy-Jill Levine, and Esther Fuchs.

This collection of studies, reflecting developments in feminist exegesis over the last few years in Europe and the United States, includes treatments of key female figures ('Tamar and the Coat of Many Colours' by Adrien Janis Bledstein; 'Michal, the Barren Wife' by Lillian R. Klein; 'On Centering a Fringe Figure: The Wife of Jeroboam in 1 Kings 14:1-18' by Uta Schmidt; 'The Widow of Zarephath and the Great Woman of Shunem: A Comparative Analysis of Two Stories' by Jopie Siebert-Hommes), and a new examination of a biblical threesome, 'Saul, David and Jonathan: The Story of a Triangle? A Contribution to the Issue of Homosexuality in the First Testament' by Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli.

The second series of Feminist Companions moves beyond the confines of sex- and gender-specific issues and studies of biblical women. Biblical feminist critics now address contemporary life situations, marginalization and a range of questions once not thought accessible to such critique. Feminist theory has also continued a rapid evolution. Among the topics included in this volume are composition, Torah, Ruth-the-Cat, female networking-together with much else to inform and stimulate female (and male) biblical scholars and non-scholars.

The second volume of the series takes up que stions of voice, exclusion and construction as well as the r einforcement of the world views that have a legacy of contin ued gender asymmetry in Judaism and Christianity. '

Since the publication of the first Genesis volume in The Feminist Companion series in 1993, feminist scholars have become both prolific and better recognized, and it has now become possible to present a new volume on Genesis, consisting of recent unpublished essays on the topic. The essays in this collection are grouped under the headings 'Creation and Paradise Revisited', 'Mal�e�Practices' and 'Female Modes' and are written from perspectives gleaned from disciplines such as psychology, art history and art criticism, sociology, anthropology and literary criticism. Some of the essays presented here constitute a dialogue with earlier papers in the first Genesis companion, making the two volumes an indispensable resource for reclaiming the female heritage found in the book of Genesis.

This volume is part of a series which provides a fundamental resource for feminist biblical scholarship, containing a comprehensive selection of essays, both reprinted and specially written for the series, by leading feminist scholars. The contributors to this volume are Lyn Bechtel, Mark Bredin, Athalya Brenner, Edna Brocke, Carole Fontaine, Lillian Klein, Amy-Jill Levine, Judith Lieu, Heather McKay, Adele Reinhartz, Jane Schaberg, Marla Selvidge, Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Beverly Stratton, Arie Troost, Pieter van der Horst, and Bea Wyler. >

Provides feminist approaches to Wisdom Literature from leading scholars of the Hebrew Bible and feminist hermeneutics. >

The authoritative status of 'Prophecy' in the Bible poses a challenge to the feminist readers. This challenge is sharpened by the widespread symbolism in prophetic discourse of woman, wife, mother, harlot and the use of what the volume call 'pornoprophetics'. In this collection it is the book of Hosea that attracts special attention, but there are also articles on sexual violence and an introductory essay on prophecy itself as a literary phenomenon. This Feminist Companion offers a sharp confrontation between the voice of the prophetic male and the resistance of the feminist reader.

Do we confront in these three characters feminist heroines or patriarchally idealised stooges? From the worldly Esther to the piously devout Susanna via the militant widow, these female figures appear both as meticulously sculpted individuals.

This volume is part of a series which provides a fundamental resource for feminist biblical scholarship, containing a comprehensive selection of essays, both reprinted and specially written for the series, by leading feminist scholars. The essays in this volume deal with social status and female sexuality, the textual figure of 'the daughter' and the character of Miriam. 'An enterprising series of collections of important and pioneering studies.... Those teaching feminist courses will find the books invaluable as a resource for students' (C.S. Rodd, Expository Times). >

A stimulating collection of studies by leading feminist scholars offering radical readings of the Old Testament books of Samuel and Kings. Although gender ideology may have been only a 'side issue' for the writers of these texts, the articles in this collection show that it is definitely a constituent of the general ideological framework of this section of Israel's historiography, and they explore the texts for women's lives, female voices, gendered types, and the presence of women in the written history. As Athalya Brenner states in her introduction to the volume, in looking at the presentation of women and femaleness in Samuel and Kings we 'encounter chiefly relational images': women are seen as daughters, mothers, queen mothers, and in their relations to kings and prophets. >

The book of Judges is replete with female figurations, and has, therefore, received a lot of attention from feminist critics. This volume of essays, however, changes the motivation behind this apparent centrality of female figures, claiming that in fact strong androcentric premises underlie the texts. The overall theme of this sparkling collection focusses on wives, daughters and mothers, and their relationships. An introductory section surveys the women of Judges, investigation satire, paradigm and deviation and the midrashic sources; Brenner and Van Dyck investigate the story and song of Deborah; Fuchs and Exum turn their attention to Jephthah's daughter; Amit and Reinhartz look at women in the Samson story. Finally, three essays, including one by Mieke Bal, deal with the brutal finale of the book in chapters 19-21. >

This volume is part of a series which provides a fundamental resource for feminist biblical scholarship, containing a comprehensive selection of essays, both reprinted and specially written for the series, by leading feminist scholars. 'An enterprising series of collections of important and pioneering studies.... Those teaching feminist courses will find the books invaluable as a resource for students.' C.S. Rodd, Expository Times.