Introduction

The current flourishing of varieties of feminist interpretation among religious organizations and in the academy has been going on since at least the 1970s, and has grown to display an amazing diversity of emphases and forms. At the same time, much work still needs to be done. The appearance from Sheffield Phoenix of Susanne Scholz’s three-volume edited work, Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect,[1] by its breadth of coverage and its conscious attempt to reflect on the work of past decades, offered the Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible Section of the Society of Biblical Literature an opportunity to assess the distance feminist interpretations have traveled in the last 40–50 years and where we should focus energy for the future. The following papers share the reviews offered by five colleagues at a panel session at the SBL Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday, November 19, 2017, and Prof. Scholz’s response. The reviewers represent an array of feminist perspectives that is diverse in race/ethnicity, nationality/culture, gender, age, and stream of religious tradition. The reviews probe not only a variety of dimensions of Prof. Scholz’s work, but also a variety of points of progress and ongoing issues in feminist interpretation.

[1] Susanne Scholz (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible in Retrospect (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013–2016).