044 Had someone told me a decade ago that I would be teaching a course on “Women and the Bible,” I would have laughed. My academic training in Bible was quite traditional. The word “gender” never entered the classroom. Yet I have just completed...

063 The publication of the third section of the Hebrew Bible, The Writings (Kethubim), marks the completion of the new Jewish Publication Society Bible translation, abbreviated NJPS.a This is the first Bible translation executed by a panel...

038 Sacred sex, child sacrifice, the cult of the dead—these are the subjects of a powerful, 11-verse poem in Isaiah 57:3–13. Our task will be to understand how the poet makes his points, why he juxtaposes these three seemingly different subjects...

020 Six barren woman in the Bible receive an annunciation from God promising an end to their barrenness. In a 1983 article,1 Robert Alter borrowed the term “type-scene” from Homeric scholarship and used it to describe these six biblical stories...

046 Israel emerged as a people just before the period of the Judges, at the end of what archaeologists call the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.) and the beginning of Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.)—the time when the Israelite tribes settled in the...