Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second ) series – serie

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.

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.

Judges is a book with much to say about women, especially about their fate in a masculine world, subject to male values. This sparkling new collection of studies subjects Achsah, Delilah and Jephthah's daughter to the female critical gaze, while an increased emphasis on the body (whether gendered or not), violence of various forms, and intertextuality reflect the growing importance of these issues in biblical exegesis. The contributors to this second Judges Companion are Lillian Klein, Claudia Rakel, Shulamit Valler, Phyllis Silverman Kramer, Carol Smith, Renate Jost, Ilse Müllner and Alice Bach.

The ten essays in this volume, the majority specially written, engage with questions of voice (whose?) and interplay (what kind?) between received interpretation and resisting female reader, and venture into methodological territory familiar and unfamiliar to biblical scholars, including autobiographical criticism. Among earlier readers invoked in these pages are Jerome, Rashi and Fray Luis de LTon, who brush pages with Haitian prostitutes. The three sections of this fresh, colourful and adventurous journey into love, sex, allegory and self inside the Most Sublime Song are: Feminist Appropriations; Specific Readings: Allegories and Feminists; and The Song of Songs Personalized.

The studies in this collection, reflecting recent developments in feminist exegesis in Europe and the United States, comprise three 'revisits': the first, to Exodus and Moses, includes Susanne Scholz on a literary feminist reading of Exodus, Harold Washington on Exodus and Zora Neale Hurston's 'Moses, Man of the Mountain', Ilona Rashkow on 'Oedipus Wreckes: Moses and God's Rod', and 'Divine Puppeteer: Yahweh of Exodus' by Cheryl Kirk-Duggan. The second revisit, to Miriam, comprises 'Miriam' by Phyllis Silverman Kramer, 'Miriam Re-Imagined, and Imaginary Women of Exodus in Musical Settings' by Helen Leneman, Alice Bach, 'Dreaming of Miriam's Well' and Irmtraud Fischer on 'The Authority of Miriam'. The third revisit is to Daughters, where Tal Ilan writes on the daughters of Zelophehad and Leila Bronner on' Serah and the Exodus'.

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 feminist Companion to the Bitle (second series) This sparkling new collection of studies covers topics such as the Queen of Heaven, Saying No to a Prophet, Circumcision of the Prostitute, with the section on Daniel addressing, among other things, the wise queen mother of Daniel 5, and the Obtuse Foreign Ruler. This sparkling new collection of studies includes a reassessment of previous feminist exegesis, reconsiders women as prophets and takes a new look at goddesses. In particular, it looks more closely at the 'porno-prophetic' marriage metaphor. Essays include Judith Hadley on the Queen of Heaven, Mary Shields on 'Circumcision of the Prostitute', Julia M. O'Brien on 'Saying "No" to a Prophet', and articles by Esther Fuchs, Renat Jost and Rainer Kessler. The section on Daniel comprises A. Brenner on the 'Obtuse Foreign Ruler' in the Hebrew Bible, H. van Deventer on Women's Wisdom in Daniel 5, and an essay by Emily Sampson.

This volume in the acclaimed feminist companion to the bible series, edited by Athalya Brenner, draws together a range of leading biblical commentators to discuss one of the most challenging and fascinating biblical texts for feminist interpretation, the book of Genesis.

While the Wisdom volume in the first Feminist Companion series investigated multiple aspects of characterizations of women found in Wisdom literature, the 13 essays in this volume move beyond the study of the characterization of females that formed one of the first steps of modern feminist criticism-the recovery of what had been ignored or trivialized by androcentric readings dominant through the centuries. This second volume takes up questions of voice, exclusion and construction as well as the reinforcement of world views that, while perhaps necessary to the survival of the postexilic community as a whole, nevertheless left a legacy of continued gender asymmetry in Judaism and Christianity.