Helpmates Harlots And Heroes

In this comprehensive book, the first of its kind, the author shares the work of many feminist biblical scholars who have examined women's stories in the last twenty-five years. These stories are powerful accounts of women in the Old Testament--stories that have profoundly affected how women understand themselves. -- Publisher description.

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.

In this volume, Alice Ogden Bellis considers the book of Proverbs as a structural whole, the sages having designed it in such a way as to make positive statements about women and to undercut the negative ones. By grouping Proverbs together around common issues, the reader is called to consider the perennial moral questions of wealth and poverty, diligence and laziness, and integrity and corruption, as well as the relationship among these values. The result is much more complex and has greater depth than the random list of bromides that most of Proverbs is often thought to be. This volume opens up a multi-dimensional spiritual puzzle.

Womanist Midrash is an in-depth and creative exploration of the well- and lesser-known women of the Hebrew Scriptures. Using her own translations, Gafney offers a midrashic interpretation of the biblical text that is rooted in the African American preaching tradition to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Gafney employs a solid understanding of womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Near East. This unique and imaginative work is grounded in serious scholarship and will expand conversations about feminist and womanist biblical interpretation.

In this unique volume, father-and-son team Walter and John Brueggemann take a close look at our fractured American society and suggest ways for improvement. Using six themes identified by some scholars as the moral foundations of societycare, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctitythey examine the unsustainable patterns of our contemporary society and reveal how those patterns played out in the ancient world of the Old Testament. Brueggemann and Brueggemann demonstrate how comparing the current state of these moral foundations with what God wanted them to be can help us better respond to the challenges of today. They assert that achieving any significant change will require the work of all of us and will be grounded in a vision of neighborliness. Rebuilding the Foundations will inspire readers to reorient toward a better way of living, both for themselves and for all living things.

For many years I have had an interest in the equality of women and men, particularly in the church, where it has been woefully lacking for the most part. More recently Fundamentalist theologians have become increasingly blatant in asserting that the Bible teaches subordination of women to men both inside and outside the church. I have argued that this idea results from an irresponsible proof-texting from the Bible. I am convinced that, when taken as a whole, looking at all passages referring to women, the Bible supports the complete equality of women with men. I have undertaken to demonstrate this fact by looking carefully at the stories of women in the Bible, both named and unnamed, who were not submissive to men and who refused to settle for the role which their society attempted to assign them. I have taken these passages from the Bible and interpreted them within the context into which they are placed, to the degree that this can be determined. My goal was to find every story in the Bible in which a woman stepped out of her societal role and did something only men were supposed to do. I leave to the reader to decide whether or not I have succeeded.

Bonnie Thurston examines the personalities, place, and power of women in the New Testament. She provides a cultural and religious context for them by briefly outlining the position of women in the Greco-Roman world. The aim is to reveal the ways in which early Christianity attempted to liberate people from oppression (particularly patriarchy), as well as to point out the places and ways in which the early Christian community compromised with the dominant society.

The Jerusalem Bible, Ellerdale Road, St Paul's Girls School and a baby monitor: books and streets, buildings and objects fill this bildungsroman set in Hampstead, North West London. Sarah Lightman has been drawing her life since she was a 22-year-old undergraduate at The Slade School of Art. The Book of Sarah traces her journey from modern Jewish orthodoxy to a feminist Judaism, as she searches between the complex layers of family and family history that she inherited and inhabited. While the act of drawing came easily, the letting go of past failures, attachments and expectations did not. It is these that form the focus of Sarah's astonishingly beautiful pages, as we bear witness to her making the world her own.