The Hebrew Bible: Feminist and Intersectional Perspectives

by Gale A. Yee (Editor)

This volume provides an introduction and essays on the four key sections of the Hebrew Scriptures from the perspective of top female biblical

Part Torah/PentateuchPart Deuteronomistic History (Joshua–2 Kings)Part Prophets and ProphecyPart Writings and the Book of Daniel

This volume highlights key issues in the Hebrew Scriptures from the perspective of top female biblical scholars. This includes historical critical and literary textual analysis and exegesis, particularly as viewed through feminist and intersectional interpretive lenses. Intersectional lenses include the racial/ethnic, class, Global South, postcolonial, and so forth, and their interconnections with gender.

The introduction to the volume by the editor introduces feminist intersectional biblical scholarship, making the case that this scholarship addresses perspectives that are often missing from even very thorough survey feminist and intersectional issues regarding the women characters, sexual assumptions, sexual and domestic violence, symbolization of women, class and race relations, and so forth.

The essays have been created for students who may be encountering feminist biblical and intersectional scholarship for the first time.

Other contributors to this volume include Carolyn J. Sharp, Vanessa Lynn Lovelace, Corrine L. Carvalho, Melody Knowles, and Judy Fentress-Williams.

Genres: Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, Feminism, Judaism, Christian, Old Testament

195 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2018

About the author

Gale A. Yee (Chinese: 余蓮秀; pinyin: Yú Liánxiù; born 1949) is a Marxist feminist scholar of the Hebrew Bible. Her primary emphases are postcolonial criticism, ideological criticism, and cultural criticism. She applies feminist frameworks to biblical texts. An American of Chinese descent, she has written frequently on biblical interpretation from an Asian American perspective.

Reviews

[Leslie Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book a low score not because it was poorly written. It wasn't. It has very learned people discussing a hugely juicy topic. But the reading was often extremely dry and academic, and I just found it very hard to read. We had to read it for our EfM class.

[John Defrog: global citizen, local gadfly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another textbook assigned to a class on the Old Testament I’ve been taking for the past academic year, but hey it counts, right? As the title implies, it’s essentially a short collection of essays that provide an overview to the basics of feminist and intersectional perspectives on the OT. The introduction provides an overview of the field of feminist theology itself, while the four essays are essentially pro tips for freshman feminist theology students looking at specific sections of the OT (Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the prophets, etc), highlighting kinds of issues raised by feminist interpretations of the text, starting points for further study, etc.

If, like me, you know next to nothing about feminist theology, even as a brief overview, there’s lots to chew on, given the obvious patriarchal perspective of the OT’s writers and editors, to say nothing of the patriarchal and highly sexist culture of ancient Israel and the Levant itself. Obviously, what readers make of it will depend greatly on their opinions about feminism in general (favorable or otherwise), their feelings about interpretations of Scripture that depart from established orthodoxy, and their tolerance for dry, intellectual academic prose. (I mean, it IS an academic textbook for university-level studies, meaning the target audience is students taking a class that covers this topic.)

So, my rating is more of a reflection of the fact that, as someone who has only ever encountered feminist theology in passing, I learned things I didn’t know before. So there you go.

[Gretchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Too much academese. I’m not sure why EfM thought this was an appropriate book to include in the core curriculums.

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

o This book is intended to be a supplement to standard introductions to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, highlighting key issues of interpretation from feminist and intersectional perspectives that have arisen particularly during the last fifty-five years. They include sociohistorical, literary, and interdisciplinary analyses of the Bible, viewed through the interconnected lenses of gender, race/ethnicity, class, the so-called third world, and colonial status, which are often absent from these introductions.
• Introduction: Definitions, Explorations, and Intersections by Gale A. Yee
o Definitions
 Feminism: in the most general sense: the political activism by women on behalf of women.1 When used in biblical studies, feminist criticism is one of a series of recent methods of biblical exegesis (interpretation) that fall under the term “ideological criticism.”
 Ideological criticism: investigate the power differentials in certain social relationships in the production of the text (who wrote it, when, and why), how these power relations are reproduced in the text itself, and how they are consumed by readers of various social groups.
 Intersectionality: a term coined in 1989 by the African American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw to theorize the complex interconnections between gender, race, and class that have marginalized black and nonwhite women in the subjugation they routinely experienced. Moreover, intersectional interfaces have sometimes been broadened theoretically to include other categories of analysis along with gender, race, and class, such as sexuality, colonial status, ethnicity, physical ability, and so forth
o Can women become like men? Do women want to? Should they want to?
 Wave 1 feminism: began in the eighteenth century with the treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, who argued that the dependence of (privileged) women on men kept them in their homes and deprived them of becoming educated and being independent rational agents like men. The movement toward women’s rights continued in the nineteenth century with the women’s suffrage movement
 Wave 2: began during the politically turbulent 1960s, sparked by the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique and the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other liberal feminist women’s rights groups. Liberal feminism advocated equal rights for women in employment, education, reproduction, and other legal matters. Some of its gains were the right to vote, to education, to work outside the home, access to birth control and legalized abortion, the enactment of affirmative action laws, and laws against sexual and domestic violence. However, liberal feminism primarily advanced the concerns of white, heterosexual, middle-class, educated women and neglected the concerns of poor women of color. Furthermore, it made being “male” the ideal by presuming that women could become like men if they wanted to, that women wanted to become like men, and that they should want to become like men.
• Radical feminists criticize rights-focused agenda, thinking that women’s oppression would not be eliminated simply by changing the laws, educating women, and letting them have careers outside the home. Women’s oppression went much deeper because it was embedded in a male system characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition
• Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” traced the roots of women’s oppression by analyzing the male thinkers Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan on how they theorized what she called “the sex/gender system.” The sex/gender system “is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity.”7 Sex referred to one’s biological anatomy; gender referred to the social constructions based on one’s biological anatomy.
 Marxist Feminists: identified two systems oppressing women, class exploitation and patriarchy, examining the ways in which they colluded in subjugating women and where their interests collided.11 They sharpened Marx’s under- standing of ideology12 in the cultural production of gender in sophisticated ways.13 They were particularly important in developing standpoint theory, which presumed that all knowledge was constructed from situated positions within different social locations that influenced how people viewed the world, such as different race, gender, and class positions.
 Postmodern feminists: In postmodern theory, social reality and human subjectivity (one’s sense of self) were formed in and through language. What we know about the world and ourselves was defined and contested in the language of historically specific discourses. Discourse broadly referred to the various symbolic and linguistic systems and narratives used in human communication, such as legal discourse, political discourse, medical discourse, and right-wing discourse. There was no “reality” or “real world” because what we thought was “real” was known only through different and often conflicting discourses.
 Queer theory: an amalgam of postmodernism, feminist theory, and gay/lesbian studies. Postmodernism argued that all language was composed of binary pairs of opposition, like white/black, heaven/hell, soul/body, male/ female, saved/sinner. The problem with binaries was that one part of the binary was privileged over the other. Queer theorists wanted to subvert the binaries of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual by highlighting gender and sexual fluidity. Taking her cues from Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “one is not born, but, rather becomes a woman,” Judith Butler argued that because of its instability, gender was “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Gender came into being through the repeated performances of acts, norms, and conventions associated with heterosexual maleness and femaleness, such as wearing pants for men and dresses for women. (7)
o Theorizing Intersecting Identities
 Before recognizing intersectionality as a critical aspect of feminist theory, white feminists had different ways of dealing with multiple oppressions. As Spelman pointed out, one model was to rank oppressions in a hierarchy, treating one form of oppression as earlier or more fundamental than others. Another way of dealing with multiple oppressions was known variously as the “tootsie roll,” “pop-bead,” and “ampersand” approach. This was an additive model in which multiple oppressions, such as racism, sexism, and classism, were treated as separate and distinct. Oppressions were simply added together and people just described as doubly or triply subjugated.
• Neither model adequately dealt with the reality that oppressions formed an integrated whole with each continually interwoven with the other.
 Crenshaw’s intersectionality emerges. Patricia Hill Collins adds her theory of “matrix of domination.”
• According to Collins, any particular matrix of domination was organized through four interrelated domains of power: the structural (institutional structures of society), the disciplinary (ideas and practices that characterized and sustained bureaucratic hierarchies), the hegemonic (the ideas, symbols, and ideologies that shaped consciousness), and the interpersonal (the interactions of people at the macro- and micro-levels of social organization).
• The structural domain organizes oppression, whereas the disciplinary domain manages it. The hegemonic domain justifies oppression, and the interpersonal domain influences everyday lived experience and the individual conscious- ness that ensues.”
 Asian American and Latina American Feminists have also been actively involved here.
 WOC Feminists on a Global stage: Variously known as third-world feminists, postcolonial feminists, and transnational feminists, these feminists highlighted the impact of global capitalism, racism, war, genocide, colonization, and poverty in the experiences of indigenous third-world women.
• Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Her aim was to make visible and dismantle the privilege and ethnocentrism in the discourses of many Western feminists when they write about women living in the third world. This ideological social construction of the third-world woman in certain feminist discourses was mistaken for real, historical groups of third-world women, reducing them to powerless, victimized, exploited, and sexually oppressed beings.
o Feminist Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible
 Early milestones
• EVE AS ICON: Twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen saw Eve as prefiguring Mary, the mother of Jesus. Before the fall, sex between her and Adam was free of lust, their relationship complementary and interdependent. She would give birth painlessly through her side in the manner that she was created from Adam.45 Christine de Pizan later argued that Eve, created from Adam’s rib, would therefore “stand by his side as companion and never lie at his feet like a slave, and also that he would love her as his own flesh”
• Sojourner Truth loved Eve too (17)
 Feminist Literary and Historical Interpretations of the Bible
• The composition of the biblical text as well as its interpretation throughout the ages tends to focus on male interests and ideologies. This changed during the 1970s and ’80s, when professionally trained female biblicists began to apply feminist perspectives in their historical and literary exegesis (interpretation) of the Hebrew Bible.
• Phyllis Trible argues for “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” in one of the first essays of feminist biblical interpretation, although she does not label herself a radical feminist.55 Trible does not perceive an either/or opposition between biblical faith and the movement of women’s liberation. As a Christian believer, she maintains that the objective of biblical faith was not to create or perpetuate patriarchy but rather assist in the salvation of both women and men. The biblical text itself contains the means of depatriarchalizing its sexism in, for example, the maternal imagery for the deity, the Song of Songs, and the Exodus tradition. EVE’s creation, for Trible, results in creation of sexuality itself. Trible also does TEXTS OF TERROR She singles out four stories of the cruelty men inflict upon women: Hagar, the cast- off Egyptian slave woman (Genesis 16 and 21); Tamar, the Judean princess raped by her half-brother (2 Samuel 13); the concubine from Bethlehem, dismembered by her husband after being gang-raped (Judges 19); Jephthah’s daughter, sacrificed as a burnt offering by her father (Judges 11).
• Phyllis Bird “Images of Women in the Old Testament,” attempts to deal with the diversity of these images by situating them in the historical times in which they were composed and in the literary genres, such as law codes, in which they are found. Bird’s historical work on women’s place in Israelite cult reveals that the centralization of Israelite cult restricted women’s participation in pilgrim feasts and local shrines. However, cross- cultural studies draw attention to rituals and devotions revered by women, especially in the different cycles of their lives, which may have been hidden beneath the biblical text or regarded as frivolous or heterodox by the dominant male cult
• Carol Meyers enlists archeology and the social sciences to reconstruct the lives of ancient Israelite women, particularly during Israel’s pre-monarchic or tribal period. Anthropological studies of pre-industrial societies demonstrate that even though women have been denied access to formal avenues of power, they can exert informal power to achieve their ends.
• Athalya Brenner’s The Israelite Woman is the first book-length treatment of women’s professions and social institutions, such as queens, wise women, poets, prophets, magicians, sorcerers, witches, and prostitutes, and the different literary types of women and their behaviors, as mothers, temptresses, foreigners, and ancestresses.
• Perhaps the highpoint of feminist scholarship during the 1990s was the publication of The Women’s Bible Commentary in 1992. In contrast to Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible, professionally trained female scholars penned the commentaries for each book of the Old and New Testaments, selecting those passages that they judged to be of particular relevance to women. The change in nomenclature from Stanton’s “Woman’s Bible” to “Women’s Bible” reflects the editors’ recognition of the diversity among women who read and study it.
o Feminist Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Bible
 Esther Fuchs, an Israeli secular Jew, who contributed two essays in one of the earliest collections of feminist biblical scholarship, writing on the sexual politics of mothers and the alleged “deceptiveness” of biblical women
 Deconstructive Criticism: an act of reading that exposes the ways in which biblical texts contradict themselves and highlights elements of the text that traditional readings have overlooked or have intentionally ignored. Such a reading explores the complex and sometimes conflictual nature in the text’s production of meaning, as opposed to a reading that reduces a text’s meaning to a single or dominant interpretation.74 Important feminist biblical scholars employing deconstructive criticism include Danna Nolan Fewell, Mieke Bal, and Yvonne Sherwood.
 Marxist/materialist criticism nvestigates the socioeconomic class relations in the biblical texts, such as rich and poor, elite and peasant, royal court and landowners, empire and vassal state, and so forth. Feminist biblical scholars adopting such criticism incorporate the issues surrounding gender into their class analysis
 Gender criticism is an approach to reading that explores the role of gender in society and cultural products, while simultaneously revealing the instability of categories and norms associated with gender, such as “man” and “woman,” “masculine” and “feminine.”81 Along with feminist theory, gender criticism includes insights from queer theory, masculinity studies, and intersectional analyses.
 Cultural criticism explores the different ways in which the Bible has been received and interpreted in the different high and popular cultures that encounter it. It investigates Scripture’s history of reception in its various duplications from very early times all the way up to the present.
o Intersectional Perspectives on the HB
 Womanism emerges, but questions still alive about the efficacy of this term OR feminism in conveying what these women do.
 Asian American: several overlapping themes stand out: “finding a home,” “home as memory, metaphor, and promise,” “the politics of identity,” “neither here nor there,” “liminality,” “betwixt and between,” “yin/yang is not me,” “constructing hybridity and heterogeneity,” “boundary and identity,” “obscured beginnings.” Asian Americans do not fit neatly into the white/black racial binary.
 Postcolonialism, pioneered by Musa dube, asks
• Does this text have a clear stance against the political imperialism of its time?
• Does this text encourage travel to distant and inhabited lands, and if so, how does it justify itself?
• How does this text construct difference: is there dialogue and mutual interdependence, or condemnation and replacement of all that is foreign?
• Does this text employ gender representations to construct relationships of subordination and domination? (35)
• 1. Character, Conflict, and Covenant in Israel’s Origin Traditions by Carolyn J. Sharp
o By means of stories, a community explores how it came into being and what is core to its identity.
o In order to survive culturally, communities must be malleable and adaptable in the claims they stake.1 Over time, a community’s stories are shaped to assist the process of adaptation: stories are often strategically constructed toward particular aims even when they are grounded in the authentic lived experience of the group.
o Types of storytellers
 Some may be acknowledged as official guardians of cultural memory: scribes, priests, and those in positions of political power
 Other storytellers may enjoy unofficial credentialing: a community may listen to wise elders, those with social power such as patriarchs and matriarchs in extended kinship groups, and those with access to material resources that can benefit the group.
o Distortion is inevitable in practices of memory, because hierarchies of value organize the ways in which communities think about who they have been and who they are. Not all experiences are deemed worthy of remembering; some memories are considered too dangerous to preserve. Those with less power and those who are actively disenfranchised within a community may find their truths and experiences ignored, downplayed, or relayed in distorted ways.
o Historical analysis guides the reader into a deeper understanding of the theological, social, and political norms and values promoted by different Scripture texts. Every biblical story, poem, and law has been conceived and articulated out of a specific ancient context.
o Scribes enjoyed considerable power in the ancient Near East.
 Female scribes were rare throughout the ancient Near East, though not unknown.
 Yet the scribes who wrote down and shaped our biblical texts were male and enjoyed elite status as regards education.
o In all of these cultures, the valorizing of male authority in credentialed trajectories of public service left little room for the contributions of women. This doesn’t mean that the Bible is bereft of stories, songs, prophecies, and aphorisms that may have been uttered by Israelite or Judean women or by those of social classes with less prestige and fewer economic resources. But the governing perspectives and frameworks within which Israel’s sacred texts came to be inscribed were thoroughly androcentric and elite.
o Feminist readers may, then, fruitfully inquire into ways in which gender and power are expressed, amplified, distorted, and suppressed in these texts produced by ancient Israel’s scribal culture.
o Gender includes masculinities, too, as a focus of inquiry, as well as a spectrum of femininities and non-normative performances of gender.
o THESIS: This inquiry into the Pentateuch will pursue three goals that lie at the heart of my feminist hermeneutics: to honor all subjects, to interrogate relations of power, and to reform community
 1. I claim the conviction that the lived experience of all beings, including nonhuman creatures, should be honored.
 2. I claim the conviction that all relationships involve power (implicit and explicit, unrecognized and overt), and that power should be used with t

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this to read alongside any Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) that you may be studying. All the contributors to this book (female theologians) bring a new aspect of how to view women in the Bible and the role that they played. Considering the Bible was written by men at a certain period of historical time, women are not portrayed in a very positive manner for the most part and are certainly consider "property" throughout the Hebrew Bible. These perspectives give much to pause and think about and provide a more balanced view, especially if read alongside other commentaries written by (white) men. Note: This was part of the reading for studying the Hebrew Scriptures for Education for Ministry (EfM).

[Janet Mahlum · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was required reading for Year 1 students in EfM. It was not when I was year 1, but I so enjoyed the discussions from year 1 students that I got a copy for myself. I notice from reviews people tend to like it a lot or not at all. All the chapters have different authors and I discovered that some chapters were sort of "so what?" Other chapters were outstanding. Hence, I gave it a middle rating, neither great nor awful. I would rate this as one of the better EfM selections, not the best, but certainly one in the top portion of the list.

[Joanne Pascoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Assigned book as part of Education for Ministry (EfM) 2022-2023. Heavy going -- written by academics for academics, which I'm not. Fourth chapter was easiest for me to understand -- a retrospective of the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha and references to women. Most of the material felt like an indictment of men from the 20th/21st century points of view, rather than looking at the times in context. Maybe the point was that the behaviors are still present today?

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mandatory for a class in seminary. Massively unenjoyable and far too academic. A few chapters were informative, but Yee's writing is nearly unintelligible.

[Justin Pitt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly unreadable. I was hoping for a thoughtful treatment of the subject matter. Instead, it's sort of a stream-of-consciousness academic babbling. Look elsewhere.

[Janice Pauc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seems to be written by angry feminists. The final essay was the only one I enjoyed. Required reading for EFM.

[blmagm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Understandably, as required reading for Education for Ministry, this book is an academic text for an academic audience. That said, my dad who was a technical writer himself taught me that when writing, be sure to choose the simplest words possible to get a point across. Genuinely effective writers know how to communicate complex theories in such a way using simple enough language that the general population can understand.
The authors, from their feminist perspective, offered insightful observations in their essays regarding the Hebrew scriptures, and they provided appropriate examples to illustrate their points, but slugging through endless terms such as “depatriarchalizing,” “anthologized,” “imperializing,” “fetishizing,” and “theologizing” was tedious. I really wanted to take away the authors’ “z” key! Terms such as “heteronormativity” and “performativity” just sound pretentious after a while. The last essay “Affirming and Contradicting Gender Stereotypes” saved this from a one-star rating.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Editor Yee’s preface to the book states:

This book is intended to be a supplement to standard introductions to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, highlighting key issues of interpretation from feminist and intersectional perspectives that have arisen particularly during the last fifty-five years.

All the authors, including Yee are biblical scholars and professors teaching at different theological seminaries whose special areas of knowledge are grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures. The four sections of the book cover the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Their modern insights on these ancient texts writing in a time when patriarchy was the norm are incisive and illuminating showing numerous perspectives on passages in the Bible on the status and actions of women living in society in which it was written and the points of view of the original authors of the scriptures.

It’s well worth reading, a helpful aid to Bible reading for lay readers as well as students and clearly written.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many who have reviewed this book, I read it as part of required reading for First year EfM students. While it is heavy going at times - academic, dense, etc., it introduced an important way to look at the Hebrew Bible from a feminist perspective. Some of the terms and discussions I was somewhat familiar with before reading the book, but much of it was new to me. It is an important companion to the Hebrew Bible...if I didn't have this perspective, it would have been even more difficult to get through the bible reading!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a wonderful supplement for intro to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament classes. Contributors tackle questions and textual difficulties that are most likely not addressed in a standard introductory textbook. Yee introduces and defines feminist and intertextual methods, and each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading. A worthy textbook or recommended read for an OT course.

[Brandon Beck PhD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes! More people need to read this collection of scholarly essays. What gets heard loudest are the voices of power and privilege leaving so many Others to believe they are alone or don't have a story in history or religion. Yee et al demonstrate how Jesus told all our stories and continues to do so, and they do it without pedantics or preaching. Come as you are.

[Jim Rowley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must say I struggled getting thru this. Heavily flavored with the passive voice of academia, I wanted to really enjoy this work. I long have been insulted by the patronizing patriarchy of the Hebrew scriptures but in a strange way, I found this book an apologetic.
Think I missed it somehow. I'll chalk it up go my male privilege and bias against the Old Testament

[Jim S · Rating 3 out of 5]

We were assigned this as part of the eFM course for our church from the University of the South. This is a feminist interpretation of the Hebrew bible. Much criticism for Androcentirc View of the Bible. There are all the issues of applying 21st century standards to a society and document from 2500+ years ago. But if you want a feminist reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible this is good .

[Kristen Griffis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to read this for my EfM course. I enjoyed Chp 4, but that was about it. I can appreciate an academic text, but this was simply boring. Hate that I didn’t enjoy it bc I feel like there’s plenty content for a topic as this one.

[Lisa Yaggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read as part of my EfM curriculum. It’s a scholarly take on the roles of women in the Old Testament. Which is bleak at best. The book does make you think about themes you might not have otherwise imagined.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

spectacular

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some essays were interesting, others not so much. I enjoyed the last one the best.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent reading on how and why oppression came about and points out flaws in patriarchal teachings.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this for EfM. Dry, too-academic navel-gazing. Often too great a stretch taken to prove its points. Did not enjoy.

[Debi Gupton]

I did not finish reading this book.

[Mary Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book for different theological perspectives. The essays gave me lots of food for thought.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the texts for my EfM group at church. It’s made up of essays from several scholars, and some I liked far better than others. But overall, it was a lovely companion to our Hebrew Bible Intro textbook (which I didn’t like much). LOTS of resources for further reading as well.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for EfM - grateful to the editor who assembled these essays to help shed light on the overlooked role and impact of women in the Hebrew bible.

But - definitely an academic “exercise!”

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is more of an annotated bibliography but the last chapter starts some good discussion. It is actually a good book to start with if you want to try academic reading on your own.