A novel approach to Israelite kinship, arguing that maternal kinship bonds played key social, economic, and political roles for a son who aspired to inherit his father's household Upending traditional scholarship on patrilineal genealogy, Cynthia Chapman draws on twenty years of research to uncover an underappreciated yet socially significant kinship unit in the Bible: "the house of the mother." In households where a man had two or more wives, siblings born to the same mother worked to promote and protect one another's interests. Revealing the hierarchies of the maternal houses and political divisions within the national house of Israel, this book provides us with a nuanced understanding of domestic and political life in ancient Israel.
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• Why I write Midrash
• Midrashim
• Beginnings
• In search of lost paradise
• End of the line, an ecological Midrash
• Noah, the first of the just
• Moment of indecision
• Sarah's three lives
• In the shadow of his father
• Sisters
• Daughter in Israel is raped
• Old man and his grandsons
• Discredited prophetess
• Mother in Israel
• Elisheba
• Poem, Akedah revisited.

This work examines Martin Luther's interpretations of the female characters in the stories of Genesis, drawing attention to his appropriation of premodern catholic interpretations of the biblical "saints". In Luther's hands, many of these women became heroic examples of the godly life newly adapted to the worldly asceticism of emerging Protestantism. Their everyday sanctity, exercised for the most part within the limits Luther believed God had imposed on their sex, displayed a kind of piety he thought should animate Christian women in their own households. Two chapters evaluate Luther's interpretations of Eve, noting his understanding of the ideal relations between men and women. Five further chapters examine Sarah, Hagar, Rachel, the daughters and wife of Lot, and Potiphar's wife.
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This work investigates whether women in a polytheistic society had a better position than women in a monotheistic society. It compares the social and religious position of women in Ugarit according to its literary texts to that of women in Israel according to the Hebrew bible.
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• Being wise
• Living in a woman's body
• Being a friend
• Being a parent
• Healing
• Being in the divine presence.

This title presents lessons and rituals from the women of the "Bible", connecting contemporary women with their sacred stories. In this vivid collection, Judaic scholar Vanessa Ochs brings the legends of the biblical matriarchs to new life. Intimate, familiar, and wise, the heroines in "Sarah Laughed" are revealed to be inspiring role models for women today. From Eve's rebellious taste of wisdom to the righteous anger of Job's wife, each woman's story is retold in imaginative prose and accompanied by real-life rituals that you can perform at home, gaining insight into: finding inner wisdom; speaking the true self; being a good friend; maintaining romantic partnerships; raising a family Letting go of children; feeling blessed with a life well lived; and much more.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• Sarah and the promise
• Hagar, the mother of the Ishmaelites
• Rebekah and her favorite son
• Leah and Rachel, matriarchs of the house of Israel
• Miriam's well
• Eluma and Hannah
• Naomi and Ruth
• Michal saves David's life
• Abigail, the wife more precious than jewels
• The wise women of Tekoa and the wise woman of Abel
• Esther
• Judith
• A mosaic for Miriam.

A retelling of Old Testament stories focusing on women including Naomi and Ruth, Miriam, Hagar, Judith, Esther, and others.

• List of illustrations-- Acknowledgemetns--
• 1. Signs of the flesh--
• 2. Contending with the narrator--
• 3. A story of reading the story of Genesis 39--
• 4. 'I shall stir up thy mistress against thee'--
• 5. Signs of her flesh--
• 6. Wine, women and death--
• 7. Calling the shots: directing Salome's dance of death-- Bibliography-- Index of references-- General index.
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This accessible, readable book looks at the cultural study of the Bible, challenging the traditional mode of reading the women in the Bible. Alice Bach applies literary theory, cultural representations of biblical figures, films, and paintings to a close reading of a group of biblical texts revolving around the 'wicked' literary figures in the Bible. She compares the biblical character of the wife of Potiphar with the Second Temple Period narratives and rabbinic midrashim that expand her story. She then reads Bathsheba against a Yiddish novel by David Pinski, and finally looks at the Biblical Salome against a very different Salome created by Oscar Wilde, and the selection of Salomes created by Hollywood. Bach argues that biblical characters have a life in the mind of the reader independent of the stories in which they were created, thus making the reader the site at which the texts and the cultures that produced them come together.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• pt.
• 1. Comments on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.--pt.
• 2. Comments on the Old and New Testaments from Joshua to Revelation.

The majority of essays in this collection discuss biblical narratives that mention particular women: Hannah, Martha, Mary, Mary of Clopas, Michal, Susanna, the Syrophenician Woman, the Samaritan Woman, Tamar, and others. In each case the discussion takes a different aspect: for example, the chauvinism of recent Bible translations, the place of Cynic philosophy in first century Palestine, the problem of the work ethic, the questioning of Jesus' attitude to women, and early Christian missionary activity. Other essays discuss methodological issues: the inheritance of the daughters of Zelophehad is assessed from the perspective of social anthropology; the significance of the femininity of "wisdom" is analyzed with historical critical rigour; the parables of the lost are examined from the point of view of post-modernist feminism; and the logic of the passages about women in Paul's correpondence with Corinth is reconsidered.
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• Introduction: Discovering biblical women in Early Modern literary culture - Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher PART I: Women and feminine archetypes of the Old Testament
• 2. Overview: reading Old Testament women in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 - Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
• 3. A 'Paraditian Creature': Eve and her unsuspecting garden in seventeenth century literature - Elizabeth Hodgson
• 4. Christian liberty and female rule: exegesis and political controversy in the 1550s - Adrian Streete
• 5. Wives, fears and foreskins: Early Modern reproach of Zipporah and Michal - Michele Osherow
• 6. The politics of female supplication in the Book of Esther - Alison Thorne
• 7. Gender and the inculcation of virtue: the Book of Proverbs in action - Danielle Clarke PART II: Women and feminine archetypes of the New Testament
• 8. Overview: reading New Testament women in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 - Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher
• 9. Christ's tears and maternal cannibalism in Early Modern London - Beatrice Groves
• 10. Mary of recusants and reform: literary memory and defloration - Thomas Rist
• 11. Stabat mater dolorosa: imagining Mary's grief at the cross - Laura Gallagher
• 12. St Helena of Britain in the land of the Magdalene: all's well that ends well - Lisa Hopkins
• 13. Imagining the enemy: protestant readings of the whore of babylon in Early Modern England, c.1580-1625 - Victoria Brownlee
• 14. Afterword - Dympna Callaghan Index.
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At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550-1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women's narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible's women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible's women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible's women are persistently difficult to evade.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)