The Bible is often said to be one of the foundation texts of Western culture. The present volume shows that it goes far beyond being a religious text. The essays explore how religious, political and cultural identities, including ethnicity and gender, are embodied in biblical discourse. Following the authors, we read the Bible with new eyes: as a critic of gender, ideology, politics and culture. We ask ourselves new questions: about God's body, about women's role, about racial prejudices and about the politics of the written word. Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies crosses boundaries. It questions our most fundamental assumptions about the Bible. It shows how biblical studies can benefit from the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse, throwing up entirely new questions and offering surprising answers. Accessible, engaging and moving easily between theory and the reading of specific texts, this volume is an exciting contribution to contemporary biblical and cultural studies.

The Bible is often said to be one of the foundation texts of Western culture. The present volume shows that it goes far beyond being a religious text. The essays explore how religious, political and cultural identities, including ethnicity and gender, are embodied in biblical discourse. Following the authors, we read the Bible with new eyes: as a critic of gender, ideology, politics and culture. We ask ourselves new questions: about God's body, about women's role, about racial prejudices and about the politics of the written word. Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies crosses boundaries. It questions our most fundamental assumptions about the Bible. It shows how biblical studies can benefit from the mainstream of Western intellectual discourse, throwing up entirely new questions and offering surprising answers. Accessible, engaging and moving easily between theory and the reading of specific texts, this volume is an exciting contribution to contemporary biblical and cultural studies.

The body is an entity on which religious ideology is printed. Thus it is frequently a subject of interest, anxiety, prescription and regulation in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as in early Christian and Jewish writings. Issues such as the body's age, purity, sickness, ability, gender, sexual actions, marking, clothing, modesty or placement can revolve around what the body is and is not supposed to be or do. The Body in Biblical, Christian and Jewish Texts comprises a range of inter-disciplinary and creative explorations of the body as it is described and defined in religious literature, with chapters largely written by new scholars with fresh perspectives. This is a subject with wide and important repercussions in diverse cultural contexts today.

Recognizing that human experience is very much influenced by inhabiting bodies, the past decade has seen a surge in studies about representation of bodies in religious experience and human imaginations regarding the Divine. The understanding of embodiment as central to human experience has made a big impact within religious studies particularly in contemporary Christian theology, feminist, cultural and ideological criticism and anthropological approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Within the sub-field of theology of the Hebrew Bible, the conversation is still dominated by assumptions that the God of the Hebrew Bible does not have a body and that embodiment of the divine is a new concept introduced outside of the Hebrew Bible. To a great extent, the insights regarding how body discourse can communicate information have not yet been incorporated into theological studies.

This book rethinks the problem of Israelite kingship by examining how the male royal body and its self-presentation figured in the governance of the dual monarchies of Israel and Judah. As such, this is a reopening of old questions and an opening to new ones.

This valuable resource both presents and demonstrates the numerous developments in feminist criticsm of the Bible and the enormous rage of influence that feminist criticism has come to have in biblical studies. The purpose of the book is to raise issues of method that are largely glossed over or merely implied in most non-feminist works on the Bible. The editors have included broadly theoretical essays on feminist methods and the various roles they may play in research and pedagogy, as well as non-feminist essays that have direct bearing on the methods or subject matter that feminists use, as well as reading that illustrate the variety of methodological strategies adopted by feminist scholars. Some 30 scholars, from North America and Europe, have contributed to this Companion.

In this volume an international team of scholars address the theme of books as sacred beings from an impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives. Yet, as a group, they meld to engage and advance previous research to solidify the conclusion that human cultures, especially religious groups, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and books as divine beings. The studies collected here not only increase the range of examples of this phenomenon. They also show the wide variety of ways in which the identity of books, bodies and beings gets both ritualized and theorized. The articles are bracketed by an introduction to the collection, and then by a concluding essay that extrapolates the theme of books as sacred beings on a more general level.