The Feminine Spirit at the Heart of the Bible

by Lynne Bundesen

Put aside all you preconceptions about the Bible and pick up this book. Lynne Bundesen imagines what it means to breathe a women’s spirit into sacred narrative. She enriches our understanding and nourishes our souls.
—Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, author of Midrash: Reading the Bible with Question Marks and many children's books, including Noah’s Wife and But God Remembered: Stories for Women from Creation to the Promised Land

In an accessible and comprehensive way, Lynne Bundesen weaves together linguistic knowledge, insightful exegesis, history of interpretation, and feminist biblical scholarship to reveal feminine spirit—the female divine and the divine female—from Genesis to Revelation. Feminine Spirit at the Heart of the Bible is a book that Christians hungry for God the Mother will read with pleasure and share with enthusiasm.
—Mary Ann Beavis, professor of Religious Studies, author of Christian Goddess Spirituality: Enchanting Christianity, editor of She Rises, and founding editor of The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

Lynne Bundesen's The Feminine Spirit at the Heart of the Bible is an insightful reading of the Jewish and Christian scriptures focusing on the feminine, nurturing side of the divine. It calls out misinterpretations, mistranslations, and biased readings that have held women down and back for centuries. Accessible to the general reader, it is nonetheless based on sound scholarship. It is ideal for individual study or group sessions.
—Alice Ogden Bellis, Hebrew Bible professor and author of Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible and Proverbs

Bundesen's knowledge of the Bible is clear throughout, as is her agenda: to offer a new way to read the Bible with women in the limelight.
—Publishers Weekly

317 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 21, 2019

About the author

Lynne Bundesen is the author of five books addressing religious issues including “So The Woman Went Her Way”, “One Prayer at A Time”(Simon and Schuster) and “The Feminine Spirit: Recapturing the Heart of Scripture” (March 2007:Jossey_Bass). She was the manager of the Microsoft Network Religion Communities (1995-2000) and is currently the spiritual expert and community manager for www.drweil.com. From 2000 to 2003. She taught writing at the Boston Theological Institute – the consortium of Boston area Divinity Schools. She has lived in Hong Kong, Thailand, The Philippines, England, France, Sweden and Norway and the U.S. Her email address is lynnebundesen@hotmail.com.

Reviews

[Phoebe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of The Feminine Spirit at the Heart of the Bible by Lynne Bundesen
Sometimes, just the books you’ve been looking for is suddenly available! I so enjoyed and learned so much from this book. Lynne Bundensen begins discussing the often-neglected references to the feminine spirt of God from the beginning creation stories in Judaism and Christianity to the Book of Revelation at the end of the Christian Bible. Though I had read much theology in general and feminist theology in particular, this book provided study of the feminine spirit that I had not encountered elsewhere. The explanation of certain words and images (cloud, water, names of God, etc.) and going back to the original Hebrew words concerning the gender of certain words will be very helpful to my study of scripture. The concepts of time are fascinating. The chapter on Revelation gave me a whole new way of looking at this book of scripture. I think after many years of trying, I might actually make sense now of this scripture. I will be reading all scripture with new eyes now. I highly recommend this book to fellow seekers.