Drama, Violence, and the Prophetic in Hosea

This book employs a creative emancipatory womanist hermeneutic to engage a nonallegorical reading of the book of Hosea.Valerie J. Bridgeman and Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan resist normative readings of the Old Testament book of Hosea, attending to how women and girls experience oppression, then and now, thus complicating Hosea's framing of God as an angry, authoritative, patriarchal figure. By engaging in artistic dialogue, this book explores the content, context, characters, challenges, and pedagogical and homiletic concerns Hosea evokes. Kirk-Duggan and Bridgeman contend that reading the volume provides an opportunity for heightening awareness about the intersections of scripture and art, about the voicelessness of the people of Hosea, and the dangers of reading unaware of the story’s context and one’s own. Coming to Hosea as womanists and Black feminists, Kirk-Duggan and Bridgeman situate themselves, and their readers, offering an alternative reading of this Old Testament book from a womanist biblical and hermeneutical perspective.