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Reviewed by:
  • The Jewish Study Bible
  • Judith A. Kates (bio)
Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors Michael Fishbane, Consulting Editor The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 2181 pages.

This admirable contribution to the growing library of Jewishly informed aids to Bible study designed for a general audience occupies a newly opened place on the shelf. It offers a completely annotated Tanakh, using the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation. This is supplemented by introductions to each individual book and by numerous essays exploring Jewish interpretation of the Bible, period by period; the Bible in Jewish life and thought; backgrounds for reading the Bible; and questions of language and textual transmission. Also included are a glossary, tables and charts, chronologies, maps, and a variety of other aids to study. In short, this is an enormous undertaking, a full study Bible produced for the first time from specifically Jewish academic scholarship. The editors' stated goals are twofold: (1) to convey the best of modern academic scholarship on the Bible, based on the conviction that "this approach does not undermine Judaism . . . but can add significant depth to Jewish belief and values"; and (2) to reflect as broadly as possible "the range of Jewish engagement with Bible over the past two and a half millennia." The contributors make use of a variety of approaches, but all attempt to combine in some way the most up-to-date academic scholarship with awareness of and sensitivity to traditional Jewish interpretation and to the role of the Bible and of specific biblical texts in Jewish life.

Since the editors present this volume as a product of "state-of-the-art scholarship," feminist readers naturally hope to find that its contributors incorporate the wealth of feminist Bible scholarship, whether in the extensive annotations [End Page 253] that accompany the text or in the essay materials. In a fine essay entitled "Jewish Women's Scholarly Writings on the Bible," Adele Reinhartz asserts at the outset that "recent biblical scholarship has been witness to the growing visibility of women scholars and the profound impact of feminist criticism." The Jewish Study Bible does exemplify the first aspect of this claim in a serious way. Women scholars are significantly represented as authors of essays, annotators of individual biblical books, and, of course, as one of two general editors. But it would be an exaggeration to say that feminist criticism, or to put it more neutrally, feminist questions and arguments, have had a "profound impact" on the contemporary Bible scholarship represented in this volume.

With the exception of the essay specifically devoted to Jewish women's scholarship, the extensive section of essays offers few places where we hear about issues or see topics chosen that derive from attention to feminist questions or concerns. Essays on the various periods of Jewish interpretation reflect the absence of women's voices, without any mention of that fact; the one marginal exception is the mention (in a paragraph devoted to vernacular commentaries in late medieval Eastern Europe, in the essay on medieval Jewish interpretation) of the Tzene-rene and the unlearned Yiddish-speaking women who formed part of its audience. No one could expect such essays to talk about interpretive texts that do not exist, but a scholarship that has absorbed feminist concerns would take note of the exclusively male roster. The essay on the Bible in the synagogue describes in detail not only what is read, but also the customs and laws associated with public reading, yet it ignores the issue of women, even though that issue is discussed in the Talmud.

The essay by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson on the Bible in the Jewish philosophical tradition, which, like all the others, tries to summarize responsibly a very large body of material, offers a more satisfactory way of dealing with the problems of women's absence from traditional Jewish discourse. In a paragraph devoted to Judith Plaskow as "the one contemporary Jewish theologian who has succeeded in influencing how some American Jews approach the Bible," Tirosh-Samuelson notes the feminist argument that "tradition . . . ignored, silenced, and marginalized women." She goes on to mention the ongoing "insightful feminist...

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