Feminist Companion To Esther Judith And Susanna

This volume in the prestigious Feminist Companions series edited by Athalya Brenner covers this fascinating figures of Esther, Judith, and Susanna.

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.

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.

The original German edition of Feminist Biblical Interpretation received high acclaim and widespread positive reviews in Europe. That groundbreaking reference tool for contextual biblical interpretation is here available in English for the first time. With contributions from more than sixty female scholars, this is the only one-volume feminist commentary on the entire Bible, including books that are relatively uncharted territory for feminist theology.

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.

This best-selling book, now revised and updated, shares the work of many feminist biblical scholars who have examined women's stories for several years. These stories are powerful accounts of women in the Old Testament--stories that have profoundly affected how women understand themselves as well as men's perception of them. Here, Alice Bellis shares the research of feminist biblical scholarship during a quarter of a century, which renders a vast amount of refreshing, exciting, sometimes disturbing material.

Notions of women as found in the Bible have had an incalculable impact on western cultures, influencing perspectives on marriage, kinship, legal practice, political status, and general attitudes. Women and Exilic Identity in the Hebrew Bible is drawn from three separate strands to address and analyse this phenomenon. The first examines how women were conceptualized and represented during the exilic period. The second focuses on methodological possibilities and drawbacks connected to investigating women and exile. The third reviews current prominent literature on the topic, with responses from authors. With chapters from a range of contributors, topics move from an analysis of Ruth as a woman returning to her homeland, and issues concerning the foreign presence who brings foreign family members into the midst of a community, and how this is dealt with, through the intermarriage crisis portrayed in Ezra 9-10, to an analysis of Judean constructions of gender in the exilic and early post-exilic periods. The contributions show an exciting range of the best scholarship on women and foreign identities, with important consequences for how the foreign/known is perceived, and what that has meant for women through the centuries.

Hidden in Plain Sight explores the potential contours of reading biblical narrative. The Old Testament book of Esther is used to advance a prospective shape for this reading method, and proposes a profile for curriculum design. This work demonstrates that the text of Scripture itself proposes a reading method. Esther is an underestimated heroine in her story world. Her character is informed by the silent actions of Vashti and by the intentionality of Mordecai. She is confronted with a writing that challenges her with few options, each of which is deconstructed and focused in community dialogue. At a pivotal stage in the narrative, she acts in solidarity with those under a death threat, emerging as an agent of life. Esther's actions and speeches are traced as one entry into a story world, proposing a means for students of Scripture to gain appreciable reading skills via sensitivity to the general components of Old Testament narrative. This reading informs a study method enabling direct engagement with a text and appreciation for the art of literary crafting. The approach is suitable for Christian education and biblical study settings at the academic level, and for use in local church ministries.