The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible (Dispatches)

Biblical studies and the teaching of biblical studies are clearly changing though it is less clear what the changes mean and how we should evaluate them. In this book Susanne Scholz engages some of the issues as she has encountered them in the field over the last twenty years. She casts a feminist class-critical eye on the politics of pedagogy in higher education and in wider society alike decrypting important developments in the architecture of educational power. She also examines how the increasingly intercultural interreligious and diasporic dynamics in society inform the hermeneutical and methodological possibilities for biblical exegesis whether the topic is rape in ancient Near Eastern legislation or Eve and Adam in the American Christian rights approaches. In bold strokes Scholz lays out a program for biblical scholarship and pedagogy that connects to current events and ideas such as the Title IX debate inclusive language or film. Taken as a whole the fourteen chapters demonstrate that the foregrounding of gender placed into its intersectional contexts offers intriguing and valuable alternative ways of seeing the world and the Bibles place in it.