A synthetic reconstruction of women's religious engagement and experiences in preexilic Israel "This monumental book examines a wealth of data from the Bible, archaeology, and ancient Near Eastern texts and iconography to provide a clear, comprehensive, and compelling analysis of women's religious lives in preexilic times."-Carol Meyers, Duke University Throughout the biblical narrative, ancient Israelite religious life is dominated by male actors. When women appear, they are often seen only on the periphery: as tangential, accidental, or passive participants. However, despite their absence from the written record, they were often deeply involved in religious practice and ritual observance. In this new volume, Susan Ackerman presents a comprehensive account of ancient Israelite women's religious lives and experiences. She examines the various sites of their practice, including household shrines, regional sanctuaries, and national temples; the calendar of religious rituals that women observed on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis; and their special roles in religious settings. Drawing on texts, archaeology, and material culture, and documenting the distinctions between Israelite women's experiences and those of their male counterparts, Ackerman reconstructs an essential picture of women's lived religion in ancient Israelite culture.

Carol Meyers is renowned for her expertise in many fields: the use of social-science methodologies to understand the Bible and the world of Iron Age Israel; the archaeology of ancient Israel, especially important sites of the Second Temple period; and the study of women in the Bible and in ancient Israel. In this volume, some of Meyers’s foremost scholarly peers honor her by offering essays that build on her work and depend on her expertise. For example, Norman K. Gottwald uses a social-scientific analysis to continue his groundbreaking work on the structure of the early Israelite confederacy; Eric Meyers discusses how certain Second Temple artifacts, such as ossuaries and bathing installations, might be used as markers of Jewish ethnicity; and Ross S. Kraemer, in conjunction with Jennifer Eyl, takes on the issue of how women are represented (or not) in Bible translators’ renderings of certain ambiguously gendered terms. Joining this community of Carol Meyers’s peers are some of her most noted students, who also have contributed essays that speak to Meyers’s many areas of interest and expertise and reflect what they have learned from her about, especially, the study of women in the Bible and in ancient Israel, and the application of social-scientific approaches to biblical studies. Moreover, as Meyers’s work spans the millennium-long history of the Iron Age and the Second Temple period, so do the essays of Meyers’s students, with offerings that consider some of the earliest texts in the Bible (Judges 5), as well as texts that come from the Second Temple archive of scrolls discovered at Qumran. The result is a collection of essays that are as richly multifaceted as is the work of the extraordinary scholar whose career they honor.

Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love of women." These passages, along with other ambiguous erotic and sexual language found in the Gilgamesh epic and the biblical David story, have become the object of numerous and competing scholarly inquiries into the sexual nature of the heroes' relationships. Susan Ackerman's innovative work carefully examines the stories' sexual and homoerotic language and suggests that its ambiguity provides new ways of understanding ideas of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East and its literature.

In exploring the stories of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and David and Jonathan, Ackerman cautions against applying modern conceptions of homosexuality to these relationships. Drawing on historical and literary criticism, Ackerman's close readings analyze the stories of David and Gilgamesh in light of contemporary definitions of sexual relationships and gender roles. She argues that these male relationships cannot be taken as same-sex partnerships in the modern sense, but reflect the ancient understanding of gender roles, whether in same- or opposite-sex relationships, as defined as either active (male) or passive (female). Her interpretation also considers the heroes' erotic and sexual interactions with members of the opposite sex.

Ackerman shows that the texts' language and erotic imagery suggest more than just an intense male bonding. She argues that, though ambiguous, the erotic imagery and language have a critical function in the texts and serve the political, religious, and aesthetic aims of the narrators. More precisely, the erotic language in the story of David seeks to feminize Jonathan and thus invalidate his claim to Israel's throne in favor of David. In the case of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whose egalitarian relationship is paradoxically described using the hierarchically dependent language of sexual relationships, the ambiguous erotic language reinforces their status as liminal figures and heroes in the epic tradition.