The Matriarch S Devise

“If we turn our backs on who we are, who knows what danger we ourselves may become?” Orpahned by war, haunted by unknown origins, KIRA is a young woman with a secret. She can psychically communicate with certain animals. Determined to discover the truth of her heritage, Kira resumes her journey following the events of The Healer's Legacy. Together with Milos, and accompanied by her loyal companions, Kelmir and Vaith, she sets sail for the strange land across the Faersent Sea. But when she arrives in her mother’s homeland, what awaits her is not the welcoming arms of loving relatives, but a land filled with political strife, dark intrigue, and a family secret that could shatter everything.

Sarah. Hagar. Rebekah. Leah. Rachel. Bilhah. Zilpah. These are the Matriarchs of Genesis. A people's self-understanding is fashioned on their heroes and heroines. Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel--the traditional four Matriarchs--are important and powerful people in the book of Genesis. Each woman plays her part in her generation. She interacts with and advises her husband, seeking to achieve both present and future successes for her family. These women act decisively at crucial points; through their actions and words, their family dynamics change irrevocably. Unlike their husbands, we know little of their unspoken thoughts or actions. What the text in Genesis does share shows that these women are perceptive and judicious, often seeing the grand scheme with clarity. While their stories are told in Genesis, in the post-biblical world of the Pseudepigrapha, their stories are retold in new ways. The rabbis also speak of these women, and contemporary scholars and feminists continue to explore the Matriarchs in Genesis and later literature. Using extensive quotations, we present these women through five lenses: the Bible, Early Extra-Biblical Literature, Rabbinic Literature, Contemporary Scholarship, and Feminist Thought. In addition, we consider Hagar, Abraham's second wife and the mother of Ishmael, as well as Bilhah and Zilpah, Jacob's third and fourth wives.

The Bible is spare in its use of dialogue when it comes to the biblical matriarchs--Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. The written biblical text records at length, and in minute detail, the religious and national history of the Jewish people. Yet it only affords us a mere glimpse of the private and intimate lives of these strong and prophetic women. On the surface, these women--the biblical matriarchs--lived difficult and flawed lives. They endured childlessness, abduction, wearisome marriages, envy of the other woman, and difficult children. We are left wondering what they thought and how they felt, as they lived their personal lives and built a nation. This book, for the first time ever, answers these questions by drawing extensively upon classical biblical commentaries and Talmudic and Rabbinic writings which reveal the underlying emotions of the matriarchs. The reader enters the world of the matriarchs, experiencing the agony of infertility, the ecstasy of passionate love, and the pain of being unloved. Their thoughts, feelings, words and actions are fleshed out, and the women emerge not as one-dimensional figures, but as complex women possessing an array of universal passions. At the same time, these women remain grounded in Godliness, building the House of Israel as partners with the patriarchs. The Passions of the Matriarchs is a riveting and readable book that tells the story behind the passions that ruled the lives of these laudable women.

Windows On A Lost World While Captain Kirk and a landing party from the Starship Enterprise™ explore the ruins of an ancient civilization on the uninhabited planet Careta IV, they discover strange devices that appear to be windows.But the mysterious windows prove to be more than they seem when Kirk, Chekov, and two security guards enter them and disappear. Suddenly, Kirk and his team find themselves find themselves trapped in a strange alien enviorment and must fight with all their strength to survive and keep their sanity. Now Spock must locate his missing comrades and solve the window's ancient mysteries before his captain and crewmates are lost forever....

Katie J. Woolstenhulme considers the pertinent questions: Who were 'the matriarchs', and what did the rabbis think about them? Whilst scholarship on the role of women in the Bible and Rabbinic Judaism has increased, the authoritative group of women known as 'the matriarchs' has been neglected. This volume consequently focuses on the role and status of the biblical matriarchs in Genesis Rabbah, the fifth century CE rabbinic commentary on Genesis. Woolstenhulme begins by discussing the nature of midrash and introducing Genesis Rabbah; before exploring the term 'the matriarchs' and its development through early exegetical literature, culminating in the emergence of two definitions of the term in Genesis Rabbah – 'the matriarchs' as the legitimate wives of Israel's patriarchs, and 'the matriarchs' as a reference to Jacob's four wives, who bore Israel's tribal ancestors. She then moves to discuss 'the matriarchal cycle' in Genesis Rabbah with its three stages of barrenness; motherhood; and succession. Finally, Woolstenhulme considers Genesis Rabbah's portrayal of the matriarchs as representatives of the female sex, exploring positive and negative rabbinic attitudes towards women with a focus on piety, prayer, praise, beauty and sexuality, and the matriarchs' exemplification of stereotypical, negative female traits. This volume concludes that for the ancient rabbis, the matriarchs were the historical mothers of Israel, bearing covenant sons, but also the present mothers of Israel, continuing to influence Jewish identity.

Who is taken seriously as an artist? What does gender have to do with it? Is there a relationship between artistic creation and physical procreation? In Masculine Pregnancies, Aimee Armande Wilson argues that modernist writers used depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to answer these questions. The book places "masculine pregnancies" in works by Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound in the context of interwar debates about eugenics, immigration, midwifery, and sexology in order to redefine the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism. Attending to recent developments in queer theory, Wilson challenges the critical assumption that figures of masculine pregnancy necessarily reinforce oppressive norms. The book's first half shows how some writers indeed used such figures to delegitimize artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The second half then shows how others used masculine pregnancies to extend legitimacy to mannish women, dark-skinned immigrants, and their (pro)creations—and did so a century before the current boom in queer pregnancy narratives.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God of Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. In this fascinating book, renowned scholar Jo Ann Skousen shines light on Christ's maternal ancestors, including the reformed harlot Rahab, the kind and loyal Moabite Ruth, and the beautiful Bathsheba. Filled with insights that still apply today, this is a must-read for followers of the Holy Bible.

A study in the history of exegesis, this text examines Martin Luther's interpretation of the stories of the women of Genesis, evaluating his understanding of male/female relations as well as his appropriation of Christian hagiographical traditions of biblical interpretation.