Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Ancient Near East

Shawna Dolansky is Associate Professor of Humanities at Carleton University, Canada. She is the author of Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Biblical Perspectives on the Relationship Between Magic and Religion (2008) and co-author of The Bible Now (2011).Sarah Shectman is the Managing Editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization and the author of Women in the Pentateuch: A Feminist and Source-Critical Analysis (2009).

• IntroductionShawna Dolansky (Carleton University, Canada) and Sarah Shectman (Independent scholar, USA)Part 1: Gender Roles and Attributions1. Stephanie Budin (Independent scholar, UK), “Why Is Ishtar a Fertility Goddess?”2. Noam Cohen (Muhlenberg College, USA), “A Married Woman’s Right to Intercourse: Schoolboys, Law, and Female Sexuality”3. Joanna Töyräänvuori (University of Helsinki, Finland), “Divine Sexuality in the Ugaritic Texts”4. Omar N’Shea (University of Malta, Malta), “Gender Benders in the Temple of the Goddess Ištar: The Case of the Assinnu”5. Dorothea Erbele-Küster (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany), “Sexuality and Food”Part II: Ritual and Body6. Adi Marili (Bar Ilan University, Israel), “The Human Body in Ritual Worship: Performance and Meaning”7. Jonathan Stökl (King’s College London, UK), “Priestly Masculinity in the First Millennium BCE: Fragile Hegemonies”8. Céline Debourse (Harvard University, USA), “Women in Cultic Functions in Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon”9. Gioele Zisa (The University of Palermo, Italy), “‘Rear up, Make Love to Me! Rear up, Bleat for Me!’: Heteronormative Male Sexuality in the Mesopotamian Therapies for the Recovery of Sexual Desire”10. Joseph Scales (Independent scholar, UK) and Laura Quick (University of Oxford, UK), “The Emergence of Submergence: Women’s Bathing Rituals in Ancient Judaism”11. Amelia Brownridge (University of Toronto, Canada), “The Dual Feminine: An Exploration of the Pregnancy Metaphor in 1QHa 1(?)–18”12. Sarah Cook (The University of Georgia, USA), “No Body, No Crime: Dressing Yahweh-as-Tabernacle in Exodus 35–40”Part III: Violence and Power13. Chontel Syfox (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA), “Rewriting the Rape of Dinah: The Endogamous Exchange of Women and Reproductive Futurism in Genesis 34 and Jubilees 30”14. Jennifer Lehmann (Graduate Theological Union, USA), “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor HR Violation: Sexual Violence and Masculinity in Genesis 39”15. Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme (University of Oslo, Norway), “Beauty, Power, and Gender in the Hebrew Bible”16. Carmen Palmer (Stetson University, USA), “‘The Woman Was Very Beautiful’: Beautiful Women in Scripture as Purveyors of Tradition”17. R. Gillian Glass (Aarhus University, Denmark), “Inverted Pathways to Power: Heavenly Knowledge and Authority in the Book of the Watchers and Aseneth”18. Kelly J. Murphy (Central Michigan University, USA), “‘And Aaron was Silent’: Priests, Power, and Masculinities”

Dolansky and Shectman have brought together a talented group of international scholars to highlight the absolute centrality of gendered historiography, namely combining gender studies with traditional historical critical methods. The essays use current theories—but without unnecessary jargon—to suggest new, clever, and provocative readings, opening up broader interpretive possibilities for many ancient texts.