The number of edited Oxford Handbooks produced by scholars is expansive and varied, and Bible scholars are among the collection’s many editors and contributors. Most of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible volumes focus on either individual books of the Bible such as Jeremiah and Isaiah or a body of biblical literature in general such as the Prophets or the Writings. Typical to the field, essays explore social and cultic contexts, examine select biblical from a variety of historical, literary, and hermeneutical perspectives, comment on a book’s recurring theme such as violence, monotheism, exile, or trauma. Some volumes even trace a book’s reception history. As a biblical studies scholar, I contributed to several handbooks for which I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues for inviting me to participate in their work. Among the many Oxford Handbooks, however, no volume is as different, expansive, provocative, and visionary as Susanne Scholz’s edited volume entitled The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible. This volume, considered unofficially as the fourth volume to Scholz’s earlier three anthologies titled collectively as Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect,[1] is a shimmering diamond among the many other gemstone handbooks. Scholz’s volume is a testament to the uncompromising lengthy career of a scholar of conscience. For this review, my comments focus on three points: the volume’s structure; the volume’s content with specific highlights; and the contributions the volume makes to the field and the classroom. Having read carefully every essay, I am filled with gratitude and appreciation for all the cutting-edge thought and efforts of the Handbook’s 37 contributors, and editorial work done by Dr. Scholz to bring this fascinating book into existence.

a) Creating Alternatives to Malestream Structures: A Conceptually Designed Handbook

Most of the Oxford biblical Handbooks are framed according to what Scholz calls “the conventional text-fetishized system, still dominating the academic field of the Bible, that categorizes the study of the Bible according to its books.”[2] A text-fetishized structure allows for traditional thought oftentimes focused mainly on historical, literary, and hermeneutical considerations that are text-centered and divorced from present day concerns, issues, and interests. As a feminist volume, Scholz’s book does not follow a text-fetishized, malestream structure. Instead, it utilizes a conceptual framework to organize the book’s content around the categories of globalization, neoliberalism, (digital) media studies, and intersectionality. Within this framework and these categories are interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, interreligious, and artistic readings of biblical texts that connect feminist, womanist, queer, and otherwise gender-just biblical scholarship to racism, classism, homophobia, heteronormativity, phallogocentrism, geopolitics, sexual violence, and environmental degradation.

As the volume demonstrates, a conceptual framework moves away from what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza classifies as the antiquarian-historical modernist epistemic paradigm.[3] The conceptual framework allows for thinking strategies beyond a linear level, fosters meta-level content and analyses, and provides creative space for feminist biblical scholars to write on topics that can guide the field into a rich and exciting future where new possibilities evolve in the place of regurgitated, read with the grain, text analyses that contribute forcefully to the divorce of the Bible from the troubles of the world.[4] In this Handbook, Dr. Scholz and contributors break through boundaries that have long colonized readers’ intellects, stifled their imaginations, and quelled their ability to see “the bigger picture.”

b) Come to the Feast Prepared for You: Dining on the Handbook’s Content

The contents of Scholz’s Handbook offers readers a savory intellectual feast, with choice thought from around the world. As an American Roman Catholic Bible scholar and member of a women’s religious congregation, who is daily shedding my own layers of colonization from graduate biblical studies at St. Louis University, Yale University, and especially the Catholic University of America, I would not have enjoyed this feast in 2016. This volume would have left me asking, “What have these essays to do with the Bible? How are they illuminating the meaning of the biblical text?” Then in 2017, I began traversing the land of biblical studies, journeying from the world behind the text and of the text to the world in front of the text. In my view, this is the journey that all biblical scholars need to make for the present and future life of the field, the intellectual growth of students being taught Bible, and the development of a global biblical curriculum engaged in the twenty-first century. Like so many of my colleagues in biblical studies, I was enjoying the world of rhetorical and literary criticism, historical inquiry, and theological meanderings as they applied to the Bible, always reading with the grain, supporting hegemonic thinking, rarely doing metacommentating, and staying within the lines of malestream biblical criticism, but not always as evidenced from my one book on the Prophets from a Liberation Perspective. Sadly, I often contributed to the Bible being divorced from the concerns of the world as much as I contributed also to a personalized, privatized, and sentimentalized reading and interpretation of various biblical texts. I was a good Catholic biblical scholar doing my work in the context of the Catholic biblical tradition with an eye to “nourishing” the faith. Then I read Scholz’s three retrospective volumes in 2017 followed by The Bible as Political Artifact (that I now read and discuss with my undergraduate students every semester since 2018) These works turned my life, my scholarship, and my teaching upside down and inside out. Today I am able to critique the contents of this Handbook from a place of sheer delight, wide-eyed wonder, and deep appreciation for work that connects the Bible to the important conversations and thinking going on in our world today. Now more than ever Bible scholars, especially feminist Bible scholars, ought to be attuned to the pressing issues of our day and the rapidly occurring cultural shifts that are setting in motion a myriad of injustices choking the life out of all creation. Bible scholars and the work we do have a role to play in addressing today’s world situations. The contents of The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible provides a myriad of examples of how our work as twenty-first century Bible scholars is to proceed and lays a rich foundation for the development of new and exciting work in the field. In this short review, I will comment on one of the book’s four topics, neoliberalism as it pertains to higher education, and then I will offer a comment on the book’s content as a whole.

One timely topic that the book’s essays engage critically is neoliberalism. Among the contributors writing on this topic are Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Hanna Stenström, and John W. Fadden. I highlight this topic and these contributors’ essays because in our post-pandemic era, seismic shifts continue to occur in higher education where many of us in biblical studies are employed. These seismic shifts are partly due to the pandemic but mostly due to market-drivenness, the related reduction of education to utilitarianism, and the corporatization of education, all of which are compounded by the move toward global authoritarianism. Education has become the means by which students can either become future oligarchs and bio-techo-pharma feudal lords or become compliant, economically disenfranchised serfs of oligarchs and bio-techno-pharma feudal lords. In the Handbook’s opening chapter, “Biblical Interpretation and Kyriarchal Globalization,”[5] by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, she unpacks the thought of Henry Giroux and states:

…the hostile takeover of education by corporate market forces with its vicious and predatory excesses is in the process of undermining democratic processes and of radically reshaping the mission and practices of higher education. It reduces human values and experiences to data that can be measured and monetized in the capitalist marketplace. Neoliberalism’s multipronged assault produces cultural illiteracy, denies the resources for democratic collaboration, reduces human values and learning to that which can be measured, and undermines higher education’s ability to foster values like caring for each other. The values and mindsets of neoliberalism’s agenda are practiced every semester with a ‘shopping’ period during which professors have to advertise their wares to attract student consumers who at the end of the semester evaluate the products purchased.[6]

We who teach in higher education and especially in undergraduate teaching institutions, is not the thought of Schüssler Fiorenza our deepening reality? On this same topic, Hanna Stenström makes the point that “the neoliberal university implements modes of governance and policy packages that create precarious working conditions for all scholars, except for those most assimilated to the demands of the neoliberal university.”[7] She rightly states that feminist scholars live in this conflict and their research is underappreciated in neoliberal universities.

A common point within the thought of Schüssler Fiorenza and Stenström is the role that feminist biblical scholarship has in making a significant contribution to the burgeoning neoliberalism within higher education. For Schüssler Fiorenza “the task of feminist biblical interpretation is to recover the Bible as a political artifact not only for indicting neoliberal structures of dehumanization, but also for recovering a democratic-religious language of hope, dignity, and love.”[8] For Stenström “feminist biblical scholarship plays an important role in resisting neoliberal claims that there is no alternative to neoliberal modes of seeing the world.”[9] She asserts further that “alternative ways of thinking and living are possible through collective feminist work.”[10] Thus, both Schüssler Fiorenza and Stenström issue a clarion call and challenge not only to feminist biblical scholars but to all scholars in this post-pandemic era where neoliberalism and its tentacles of corporatization, utilitarianism, compliance, and authoritarianism continue the radical reshaping of educational institutions to the detriment of human intelligence, imagination, and core ethical values.

Finally, John W. Fadden’s essay on “Justifying Feminist Biblical Studies in a Neoliberal Age”[11] expands Scholz’s views presented in Artifact.[12] Fadden is spot on when he advocates teaching students “to approach the Bible and its interpreters with multiple analytical lenses such as gender, race, class, sexuality, or disability”[13] because it helps students “to better understand an important cultural and religious text. By learning the Bible’s reception history and its varied uses and abuses in various reading communities, students will develop informed notions of the Bible as a cultural and religious text.”[14] Since 2018, and as an educator for the past 43 years, 33 of which are in higher education, I approach the Bible in my classroom in all the different ways that Fadden suggests. I also include global contexts and metacommentating. Time and again, my students tell me how much they enjoy their Bible classes because the content is connected to the contemporary world, they are challenged to think broadly and deeply, they do not feel indoctrinated, and they are able to see how the study of the Bible intersects with many other topics and disciplines.

In sum, these essays on just one particular topic showcase the importance of this Handbook for feminist biblical scholarship and for the field as a whole. Scholars are writing about neoliberalism at the time they are being plunged ever more deeply into its continuous unfolding reality. Now, if Bible scholars insist on living in the nineteenth century world of only being interested in the hiphil participle, the search for authorial intention, and the quest for origins, then the field of biblical studies and the life of the mind will surely die, if that is not already happening in our midst. This Oxford Handbook is a wake-up call to the majority of the field’s scholars and teachers. The vision undergirding the volume can no longer go unnoticed nor the book’s contents go unread or unheeded. I now offer a comment on the book’s contents as a whole.

In his latest papal document titled Ad Theologiam Promovendam, or “To Promote Theology,” released November 1, 2023, Roman Catholic Church leader Pope Francis calls for a “‘paradigm shift’ in Catholic theology that takes widespread engagement with contemporary science, culture, and people’s lived experience as an essential starting point.”[15] This new paradigm will be “transdisciplinary,” will function as a “web of relationships, first of all with other disciplines and other knowledge,” with theologians making use of “new categories developed by other knowledge.”[16] Remarkably, Ad Theologiam Promovendam has already resulted in new statutes being formulated for the Pontifical Academy of Theology. These statutes shift the institute’s two-hundred-year-old focus from “promoting the dialogue between reason and faith” to promoting “transdisciplinary dialogue with philosophies, sciences, arts, and all other knowledge.”[17] What just happened in Roman Catholic Theology needs to happen throughout the field of biblical studies. Grounded in cultural studies and meta-level discussions on the cultural study of the Bible, and a feminist approach to interpretation, Scholz’s Oxford Handbook, especially Parts III and IV, is one of several efforts that pave the way for the needed paradigm shift in biblical studies. Part III of the Handbook, “The Impact of (Digital) Media Cultures on Feminist Biblical Exegesis,” engages feminist biblical exegesis and the arts: music, film, gaming, and works of literature. It explores the Bible’s impact on popular cultures. Part IV, “The Emergence of Intersectional Feminist Readings,” investigates the concept of intersectionality as it relates to various structures of domination related to gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, geopolitics, nationality, age, religion, or ableness. This part of the Handbook represents intersectionality at its best, and in Scholz’s words, the essays in this section “illustrate the wide spectrum of feminist intersectional analysis of Hebrew Bible studies, ranging from historical to queer, transgender, egalitarian-evangelical, animal, ecological, interfaith, and cross-religious studies of biblical texts, characters, and topics.”[18] To Pope Francis, and in light of his new document Ad Theologiam Promovendam, this Oxford Handbook would be a dream come true. Scholz’s vision realized through the volume’s contributed essays to this Handbook paves the way for new and exciting work in biblical studies if the discipline is to have a transformative impact on readers and the world today. Reviewing the Handbook from my perspective as a Catholic biblical scholar, my hope is that the vision and contents of this volume will impact Catholic biblical studies and the work of its scholars and teachers. This Oxford Handbook, along with Scholz’s other works, have already helped to uproot and move this Catholic biblical scholar along new paths that surprisingly now seem to align with the vision of a pope! This point brings me to my final point: why is this Handbook so important to the field of biblical studies? The reasons are several.

c) Shifting Paradigms, Cutting New Pathways: The Contributions of the Handbook

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible makes many important contributions to the field of biblical studies. In this section, I focus on five of them.

First, the Handbook offers a model filled with vision that can move biblical studies and its scholars and teachers out of the antiquarian-historical, modernist epistemic paradigm to the emancipatory, democratizing paradigm which can set in motion the transformation of the field and hasten the transformation of world. Second, the discussion on globalization and its impact on feminist biblical studies opens the horizons of readers’ minds beyond seeing the Bible as a playbook on morality or a sacred text meant to nourish one’s faith. The book belongs to the people of the globe, and its stories and poems ought to be read and interpreted in global contexts. Third, the discussion on neoliberalism awakens readers to what is going on behind the scenes in educational systems and other structures that are becoming more and more oppressive, colonizing, and authoritarian instead of democratic and liberating. Clearly feminist biblical scholars and feminist biblical interpretation can have an impact on neoliberalism. Feminist biblical scholars are faced with new challenges that invite decisive responses. Fourth, the volume represents the experiences and interests of students today who are media savvy and socially networked globally. Greater the interest is in exploring biblical texts from the perspectives of gaming or music or film than trying to figure out authorial intention, what a text means in its reconstructed historical setting, and how a text should be translated from its “original” language. Lastly, by focusing on cultural studies and feminist approaches to the Hebrew Bible, the Handbook brings the Bible into the contemporary world with a focus on contemporary issues and interests. The challenges that the essays pose to biblical scholars and to the field in general are many. Will this Handbook be lifted off the margins to become mainstream and normative or will it be a resource for “preaching to the choir” as biblical studies dies a slow death for lack of oxygen?

d) A Concluding Comment…

Despite my favorable review on a remarkable volume, there are two areas of omission. The first is the omission of material art in the digital media section. Perhaps Lot and his daughters would provide substance for a substantial essay. Second, masculinity studies is absent in the intersectionality section. Perhaps Scholz’s newly published edited volume, Doing Biblical Masculinity Studies as Feminist Biblical Studies (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2024) will be the unofficial fifth volume in this collection of edited works. Finally, thank you, Susanne, for your scholarly perseverance, incomparable focus, and collegial hospitality. Your generous efforts have brought together, time and again, global scholars from all walks of life to produce volume after volume of transformative work that captures a wonderous vision elusive to many in our field but which is shared by your many contributors to whom I owe a profound debt of gratitude as well. Together with them, you have made available to countless readers an anthology of essays that embody what the vision of what biblical studies can be, should be, and needs to be. And this reviewer has had a hard time offering a balanced, less than positive critique of this Handbook because I love its content, I see and understand its vision, and I am moved to silence, in awe of this shimmering diamond that would now probably receive even papal approval, letting me off the hook of being perceived at best, a lost soul and at worst, a heretic.

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[1] See Susanne Scholz, ed., Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect, Vol.1: Biblical Books; Vol. 2: Social Location; Vol. 3: Methods (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013, 2014, 2017, respectively).

[2] See Scholz, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), xxv.

[3] See Scholz, “Reading the Bible with Feminist Eyes: Introduction,” p. xxxviii in Handbook. Here Scholz references Schüssler Fiorenza thought and cites her work in note 55.

[4] For further discussion on this point, see Scholz, The Bible as Political Artifact: On the Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xv–xxii.

[5] See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Biblical Interpretation and Kyriarchal Globalization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 3–20.

[6] See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Biblical Interpretation and Kyriarchal Globalization,” 17–18.

[7] See Hanna Stenström, “European Feminist Biblical Scholarship in the Neoliberal Era,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 206–207.

[8] See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Biblical Interpretation and Kyriarchal Globalization,”19.

[9] See Hanna Stenström, “European Feminist Biblical Scholarship in the Neoliberal Era,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 212.

[10] See Hanna Stenström, “European Feminist Biblical Scholarship in the Neoliberal Era,” 212.

[11] See John W. Fadden, “Justifying Feminist Biblical Studies in a Neoliberal Age” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 181–198.

[12] See Scholz, Artifact, 38–43.

[13] See John W. Fadden, “Justifying Feminist Biblical Studies in a Neoliberal Age,” 198.

[14] See John W. Fadden, “Justifying Feminist Biblical Studies in a Neoliberal Age,” 198.

[15] See Jonathan Liedl, Catholic News Agency (Nov. 1, 2023) https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255887/pope-francis-calls-for-paradigm-shift-in-theology-for-world-of-today

[16] See Jonathan Liedl, Catholic News Agency (Nov. 1, 2023) https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255887/pope-francis-calls-for-paradigm-shift-in-theology-for-world-of-today

[17] See Jonathan Liedl, Catholic News Agency (Nov. 1, 2023) https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255887/pope-francis-calls-for-paradigm-shift-in-theology-for-world-of-today

[18] See Scholz, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, xlix-l.