The Women's Bible Commentary (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 196 Reviews .d) Rules that were set for keeping a framework of study can be changed only on the basis of new infonnation. Here again Naveh cautions against the passion of some scholars for change and destruction of old theories. e) Because fakes are prevalent, the epigrapher must be careful with inscriptions from unknown sources. Like other fields dealing with antiquity, epigraphic studies do not require that an assumption or suggestion be proved, but that detailed propositions be well supported and accepted by others. However, there must be proof for claims that an object is a fake. Unproven suspicions should be kept private until proof is found. Although Naveh hopes that these rules will guide epigraphers, he admits to not having followed them all himself, some times even in the present volume, because personal judgment cannot always be objective. Thus he concludes, "Every scholar invests in his work something of his personality and his world; thus his investigation is tainted with subjectivity" (p. 212). Oded Borowski Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 THE WOMEN'S BIBLE COMMENTARY. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds. Pp. xix + 396. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992. Cloth, $19.95. Anthologies of works by women writers and critics have become a staple in the fields of history, literature and psychology during the last decade. The forty-one, mostly Protestant contributors to this one-volume commentary on all the books of the Bible comprise a new collective voice in academic scholarship : American women biblicists. The contributors represent a regional conversation: their institutions lie primarily in the eastern and south-eastern part of the U.S. The nonnative text is the NRSV, and the sequence of the commentary follows the number and order in the Protestant canon with the additions to Esther and Daniel. Instead of "Lord," the divine name is rendered "YHWH" or "Yahweh." The volume does not attempt to be exhaustive in a verse-by-verse analysis. Rather, it focuses on passages of special relevance to women. Larger concepts which affect the way women are presented are also featured; for example, holiness, community boundaries , social conventions, and interpretation of historical-political events such as the Exile. Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 197 Reviews Women's feminist approach to the interpretation of scripture is designed to bring women to the foreground and reconstruct their presence, even if the scriptural texts give minimal or only indirect reference to women. Thus, the contributors may focus on texts in which women are featured in the narrative as minor or anonymous characters, as they try to recover knowledge about the condition of their lives. Literary approaches pay attention to verses which poetically highlight female imagery and gender-specific allusions such as childbirth or city. Passages shaped by men's concerns may nevertheless reveal issues in which social, economic or legal factors impact the lives of women. Even without discussion of these themes, the value of the commentary lies in its witness to women's voice and their authoritative perspective on a biblical book whose interpretation has been controlled almost exclusively by male academicians and homilists. Each commentary provides a selective bibliography of four to eight items, a list which itself attests to how spare and how recent are the scholarly contributions of women. In some cases, such as Nehemiah, there is a friendly retrieval of unfriendly texts for the light they cast on marriage and religious customs. Tamara Eskenazi creatively demonstrates how condemnation of women for idol worship can actually be valuable evidence of a social situation in which women exercised initiative in public religious activities which were an alternative to male-dominated temple worship. At the opposite pole is the commentary on Luke-Acts with an argument by Jane Schaberg that the whole third gospel is suspect because the evangelist reinforces domestic roles for women and mutes their ministerial visibility. She suggests his purported intent is to provide female catechumens with gospel-endorsed models of silent, submissive women who receive their instruction from men. Between these poles lie many contributions which impact the reinterpretation of both familiar and forgotten texts. Judith Romney Wegner's analysis of Leviticus reminds readers that the matter of menstrual pollution is...