The editor of this variegated collection of essays, Susanne Scholz, identifies this Handbook as the unofficial fourth volume to the three-volume collection, Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect (Sheffield 2017). Where the scope of that prior anthology spanned the past five decades of feminist criticism, this one ventures into new territory, applying innovative methods to new contexts in readings of the Hebrew Bible. It is free of what Scholz has called “textual fetishism,”[1] which (like a sexual fetish) fixates on a part, displacing the whole embodied being. While the white male-dominated field has been characterized by a claim to provide a value-free, “objective” reading, oblivious to questions as to why and how they read, Scholz has invited authors to be explicit about their lens, to be self-conscious about the use of theory, and to engage in a geo-politically situated reading of the biblical text that challenges “structures of domination, such as colonialism, racism, ethnonationalism, ageism, anti-ecology, or able-bodied rhetoric” (p. xxxviiii).

In this review, I focus on the ten essays in Part I: “The Impact of Globalization on Feminist Biblical Studies.” I analyze them in order of theme or shared content, rather than order of appearance.  An intersectional hermeneutics undergirds all these readings. Intersectionality – a term first coined in 1989 by Crenshaw who was concerned with the unique values. Tracing the origins of queer theory (from Foucault and Butler to Sedgwick), Punt surveys some of the queer readings in Ken Stone’s collection, “Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible”, such as Timothy Koch’s “cruising methodology” in reading the figures of Elijah, Elisha, Ehud, and Jehu. I am not sure why this essay was placed in the first section on “Globalization” rather than in section IV, “The Emergence of Intersectional Feminist Readings,” which includes three essays on queer readings of the Bible. Perhaps it sets the stage for chapter 6, “Queering Sacred Sexual Scripts for Transforming African Societies” by Sarojini Nadar. She argues that the combined heteronormative Christian readings and African myth that “homosexuality is un-African,” serve to reinforce homo/transphobic beliefs. Surveying the scholarship on Genesis 19 (where Lot offers his daughter to the men of Sodom) and Judges 19–20 (the story of the concubine of Gibeah, or “Batshever” as Exum names her), the author shows not only how heteronormative readings encourage violence against queer bodies, but also how some queer affirmative readings support violence against women. In the end, she offers a “re-scripting” of the story with the re-membered Batshever in the form of an imaginary interview from a contemporary South African perspective. Full of innovative insights, this essay was both scholarly and transparent about its geo-political lens; it also offered a ‘redemptive’ sequel, giving voice to the voiceless Bathshever in a modern context.

The second chapter by Carole Fontaine, “The Bible and Human Rights from a Feminist Perspective,” reviews the origins and history of human rights as defined on a global scale in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). She argues that one of the reasons many countries of “Religions of the Book” have not adopted a human rights agenda is because the concept has not been grounded in Scripture.  So she turns to Genesis 1:26–27 as a new foundation for human rights language: every human (male and female) is created in the image of God (imago Dei). The next two essays cover biblical reception history through a critical look at biases in translation: “Catholic Androcentric Bible Translations as Global Missionary Tools?” (chapter 3) by Carol J. Dempsey, and “The Challenge of Feminist Bible Translations in African Contexts” (chapter 4) by Dora R. Mbuwayesango.  Dempsey explores the androcentric biases in translations, such as ‘alma as “virgin” instead of “young woman” (Isa. 7:14; cf. Matt. 1:23), and “Son of man” instead of “human being” (Dan. 7:13; cf. Matt. 20:18).  These reinforce a Catholic agenda both of “supersessionism” (or “replacement theology” wherein Christianity comes to supplant Judaism, drawing upon a typological rather than contextual reading strategies) and of androcentric tropes in reading the Hebrew Bible. While chapter 3 focuses the translation of the “Old Testament” into English for the Catholic New American Bible, chapter 4 engages with the translation of Genesis 1–3 into Shona, the native language of the Zimbabwe people. This African translation replaces the name “Elohim,” which was associated with the colonialist missionary translations, by the name of the Shona god, Mwari.  In so doing, the genderless spirit god, Mwari, was transformed into a divine being that reinforces heteronormative values. Mbuwayesango claims that it is not enough to adopt African indigenous names for the deity, but “the gods of Africa need to be decolonized through the same way they were colonized, in Bible translation, but this time on the basis of feminist postcolonial translation principles” (p. 64).

Chapters 7, 9, and 10 all engage with close readings of text from the author’s particular geo-political context. Yani Yoo’s essay, “The Demand to Listen to Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Two Biblical Women,” recounts the story of 200,000 Korean girls who were forced into brutal sexual slavery to the Japanese during World War II. Only two hundred of these “comfort women” survived, and their stories only began to emerge in 1991, and they have still not been properly heard. Yoo likens the suppression of their stories to the hearing in King Solomon’s court (1 Kgs. 3:16–28) – known as “Solomon’s Wisdom in Judgment” (NRSV). Through the lens of feminist hermeneutics and the stories of women subjugated in sex slavery, Yoo calls for us to listen to the story of these anonymous women differently. Solomon uses the threat of violence –invoking a sword that would cut the infant in half – in order to cast his judgment, just as modern dictators operate with threats of violence in war. He never asks the women any questions; they speak, rather, to one another, not to him. She surveys prior scholarship and decrees the scholars oblivious to women’s experience of living under an autocratic regime. Through the women’s anonymity, pronoun ambiguity, and reading irony into their speech acts, Yoo shows how the king failed to identify the biological mother of the living child and gave the infant to the wrong mother. She concludes: “Women and innocent victims in many corners of the world endure many forms of oppression and violence. Who will use a true ‘listening heart’ and give their ears to women and the oppressed? Who will lift the sword from them and pull them out of the fire?” (p. 111). Yoo’s essay is deeply moving, offering an innovative reading of the biblical text in the light of modern Korean women’s experience of sexual slavery and the silencing of their testimony.

Funlọla Ọlọjẹde, in “Toward and African Feminist Ethics and the Book of Proverbs,” similarly locates herself in a geopolitical context.  She draws on feminist hermeneutics and traditional African communitarian notions of care and empathy in her reading of the female figures in Proverbs 1–9. “Woman Wisdom” (chapters 1, 8, and 9) is not a personification of chokhmah but, rather, a female preacher who upholds the virtues of moral integrity, honesty, prudence, and uprightness, promoting responsible membership in the community. The Strange or Foreign Woman who, like “Woman Wisdom,” is upper class, speaks to naïve young men, and offers them hospitality, on the other hand, is personified as a representative of the seductions of

Greek philosophy, foreign to the people of Yehud. Ọlọjẹde maps these contrasting female figures onto the African post-colonial context and suggests that the basis for Western philosophy – Descartes’ cogito – is like the “Strange Woman,” at odds with African communitarian values. She concludes with a warning that “an African feminist ethics is a strange bedfellow with Western feminist ethics” (p. 138), and adjures African feminism concerned with ethics to embrace communitarian values that address the particularities of African women’s experience.

The final chapter in this section, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan’s “Lament as Womanist Healing in Times of Global Violence,” explores the genre of lament as a response to patriarchal misogynist violence, and then applies her feminist lens to selections from Psalms and Lamentations, and the contemporary video production of “Hold Up” by Beyoncé. The author demonstrates how lament as a ritual can move us “toward a process of healing that shows our complex pain is also God’s pain, our sorrows, part of God’s sorrows” (p. 154).

All these essays drew me far out of my comfort zone (in a good way) and left me wanting more.  They demonstrated what Schulz set out to do in the volume—to read the Hebrew biblical text through the lens of particular women within their own geopolitical context, challenging heteronormative, androcentric readings.

[1] Or “text-fetishized system” of the male-dominated academic field (Scholz, 2023: xxv). See the definition that Scholz offers in her review of Feminist Frameworks and the Bible: Power, Ambiguity, and Intersectionality (eds. Julianna Claassens and Carolyn J. Sharp), RBL 03 (2019): “Meta-level conversations about the purpose, function, and role of feminist exegesis do not occur all that often, as textual fetishism permeates not only the white-male-dominated field of biblical studies in general but also feminist biblical studies.”