This volume gathers the writings of thirty-five nineteenth-century women on the stories of women in Joshua and Judges. Recovering and analyzing neglected works by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others, Women of War, Women of Woe illuminates the biblical text, recovers a neglected chapter of reception history, and helps us understand and apply Scripture in our present context. The stories of Rahab, Deborah, Jael, Delilah, Manoah's wife, Achsah, Jephthah's daughter, and the Levite's concubine raised thorny questions for these female biblical interpreters - questions that they addressed candidly in their writings. Could a Victorian woman use her intelligence to negotiate like Rahab? Was the seemingly well-educated Deborah an appropriate role model? Or did Jephthah's daughter more correctly model a pious woman's life as she meekly submitted to the will of her sword-wielding father? The voices collected in this book offer thoughtful reflection on and responses to these questions and more.

Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the standard history of biblical interpretation includes few women's voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume analyzes forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women-including Christina Rossetti, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others-from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women's interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an author's contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman. The contributors are Amanda Benckhuysen, Elizabeth Davis, Christiana de Groot, Rebecca G. S. Idestrom, Donna Kerfoot, Bernon P. Lee, Marion Taylor, Heather Weir, and Lissa M. Wray Beal. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)