Series: The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies

Scholars of biblical law are already widely agreed that ancient Israel did not draft law-texts for legislative purposes. Little attention has yet been given to explaining how and when later Judaism did come to regard Torah as legislative. As a result, the current consensus (that Ezra introduced legislative uses of Torah) is based on assumptions which have never been tested....

Winner of the 2023 ANZATS Award for the Best Monograph by an Emerging Scholar What can explain the persistence of gender inequality throughout history? Do narratives such as the Eden story explain that dissymmetry or contribute to it? Creating Gender in the Garden suggests that the Hebrew Bible began and has sustained a rich conversation about sex and gender throughout...

Jason Gile argues that the ideas of Deuteronomy influenced Ezekiel’s response to the crisis surrounding the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile in significant ways, shaping how he saw Israel’s past history of rebellion against Yahweh, present situation of divine judgment, and future hope of restoration. By examining Ezekiel’s use of Deuteronomy’s language and concepts, Gile stresses that the...

This volume on feminist, postcolonial, and queer biblical interpretation gathers perspectives from a global body of researchers. In offering innovative interpretations of key texts from the Hebrew Bible, both established and emerging biblical scholars consider the question of how commonplace interpretative practices may be considered to be transgressive in nature. Utilizing innovative strategies, they read against the grain of the...

This volume utilises Catherine Bell’s ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades, scholars of religion have come to realise that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s, there arose a critical framework for...