Full Description
This volume on intercultural biblical interpretation includes essays by feminist scholars from Botswana, Germany, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States. Reading from a rich variety of socio-cultural locations, contributors present their hermeneutical frameworks for interpretation of Hebrew Bible texts, each framework grounded in the writer's journey of professional or social formation and serving as a prism or optic for feminist critical analysis.
The volume hosts a lively conversation about the nature and significance of biblical interpretation in a global context, focusing on issues at the nexus of operations of power, textual ambiguity, and intersectionality. Engaged here are notions of biblical authority and postures of dissent; women's agency, discernment, rivalry, and alliance in ancient and contemporary contexts; ideological constructions of sexuality and power; interpretations related to indigeneity, racial identity, interethnic intimacy, and violence in colonial contexts; theologies of the feminine divine and feminist understandings of the sacred; convictions about interdependence and conditions of flourishing for all beings in creation; and ethics of resistance positioned over against dehumanization in political, theological, and hermeneutical praxes. Through their textual and contextual engagements, contributors articulate a broad spectrum of feminist insights into the possibilities for emancipatory visions of community.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
1. Celebrating Intersectionality, Interrogating Power, and Embracing Ambiguity as Feminist Critical Practices -- L. Juliana Claassens, University of Stelenbosch, South Africa and Carolyn J. Sharp, Yale Divinity School, USA
RETROSPECT
2. Feminist Biblical Interpretation: How Far Have We Come? -- Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA
CELEBRATING INTERSECTIONALITY
3. An Abigail Optic: Agency, Resistance, and Discernment in 1 Samuel 25 --
L. Juliana Claassens, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
4. Dinah (Genesis 34) at the Contact Zone: "Shall Our Sister Become a Whore?" --
Musa W. Dube, University of Botswana, Botswana
5. Jezebel and the Feminine Divine in Feminist Postcolonial Focus --
Judith E. McKinlay, University of Otago, New Zealand
6. The "Foreign" Women in Ezra-Nehemiah: Intersectional Perspectives on Ethnicity --
Christl M. Maier, University of Marburg, Germany
INTERROGATING POWER
7. The Violence of Power and the Power of Violence: Hybrid, Contextual Perspectives on the Book of Esther -- Marie-Theres Wacker, Westfälische-Wilhems University, Germany
8. "Is There a Man Here?" The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove in Judges 4 --
Charlene van der Walt, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
9. Miriam and Moses's Cushite Wife: Sisterhood in Jeopardy?
Funlola Olojede -- University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
EMBRACING AMBIGUITY
10. Is This Naomi? A Feminist Reading of the Ambiguity of Naomi in the Book of Ruth --
Carolyn J. Sharp, Yale Divinity School, USA
11. Stuck Between the Waiting Room and the Reconfigured Levirate Entity? Reading Ruth in Marriage-Obsessed African Christian Contexts -- Madipoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele), University of South Africa, South Africa
12. Daughters, Priests, and Patrilineage: A Feminist and Gender-Critical Interpretation of the End of the Book of Numbers -- Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University, USA
13. "I Will Take No Bull from Your House": Feminist Biblical Theology in a Creational Context -- Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA
POSTSCRIPT
14. Feminist Biblical Interpretation: How Far Do We Yet Have To Go? -- Elna Mouton, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
