This volume comprises a collection of ten essays on John 6 that provides an overview of current Johannine scholarship and a showcase for methodologies now being used in Gospel studies. The essays deal with a challenging array of critical issues.

This book is an important contribution to the debate on feminist views of the literature and religion of Ancient Israel. An international group of scholars has written 18 essays on prophetic texts digesting and evaluating the scholarly legacy of Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes.

This groundbreaking book, which builds on the author's earlier work in "On Gendering Texts," studies how, by what means and to what extent human love, desire and sex, and possibly even 'sexuality', are gendered in the Hebrew Bible. Following a classification and gendering of the linguistic and semantic data, the investigation looks into the construction of male and female bodies in language and ideologies; the praxis and ideology of sex, procreation and contraception; deviation from socio-sexual boundaries (e.g. incest, rape, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution); eroticism and "pornoprophetics." Finally, the work discusses some of the wider sociological and theological implications of the findings.

The first expansive reference examining the texts and material culture related to children in ancient Israel Growing Up in Ancient Israel uses a child-centered methodology to investigate the world of children in ancient Israel. Where sources from ancient Israel are lacking, the book turns to cross-cultural materials from the ancient Near East as well as archaeological, anthropological, and ethnographic sources. Acknowledging that childhood is both biologically determined and culturally constructed, the book explores conception, birth, infancy, dangers in childhood, the growing child, dress, play, and death. To bridge the gap between the ancient world and today’s world, Kristine Henriksen Garroway introduces examples from contemporary society to illustrate how the Hebrew Bible compares with a Western understanding of children and childhood. Features: More than fifty-five illustrations illuminating the world of the ancient Israelite child An extensive investigation of parental reactions to the high rate of infant mortality and the deaths of infants and children An examination of what the gendering and enculturation process involved for an Israelite child

This book presents a rich collection of Betty A. Reardon’s writing on gender studies, sexism and the war system, and human security from a feminist perspective. Betty A. Reardon is a pioneer of gender studies who, as a feminist, identified the structural relationship between sexism and the war system and, as a scholar, a shift from national to human security. As a pioneer in contemporary theories on gender and peace, Betty A. Reardon has continually developed research on the integral relationship between patriarchy and war, and has been an outspoken advocate of gender issues as an essential aspect of peace studies, of problems of gender equity as the subject of peace research, and of gender experience as a crucial factor in defining and attaining human security. Her work evolved in the context of international women’s movements for human rights, peace and the United Nations, and is widely drawn upon by activists and educators in order to introduce a gender perspective to peace studies and education and a peace perspective to women’s studies.

The articles in this volume have been written in memory of the feminist biblical scholar, Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes, who died at the early age of 50. The authors endeavour to continue and advance the dialogue with her by evaluating and interacting with her scholarly legacy. Their concern is with various aspects of her work on the Hebrew Bible, and they respond in particular to the feminist hermeneutics she developed for reading biblical texts. Several articles test her method in application to specific prophetic texts. Other contributions focus on aspects of the role of women in the cults of Ancient Israel. A third group of essays confronts Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes' approach with more traditional ways of biblical interpretation. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing debate on feminist insights into aspects of the literature, culture and religion of Ancient Israel.