Daughters in Danger from the Hebrew Bible to Modern Midrash
PDF (Published)
(September 2026)
ISBN: 9781918358384
Price: $100.00
Daughters in Danger confronts one of the most unsettling patterns in the Hebrew Bible: the daughter again and again is sacrificed raped silenced or erased while sons are spared. Where the Binding of Isaac ends with God staying Abraham’s hand no such rescue comes for Jephthah’s daughter or for Dinah (the patriarch Jacob’s daughter) or for Tamar (King David’s daughter). Adelman reads these dark stories not to redeem her subjects as pure victims nor to turn away in dismay but to “stay with the trouble” – tracing the complexity ambiguity and buried agency within the narratives that have flattened women into ciphers of honor and shame.
Moving from Genesis through Exodus Judges Samuel Lamentations and into the Maccabean era Adelman pairs each biblical text with its afterlife in classical rabbinic midrash and contemporary feminist reinterpretation – giving voice to daughters the Bible itself often leaves silent. Dinah’s wordless assault becomes in modern midrash a story reclaimed. Jephthah’s sacrificed daughter is transformed into an intercessor pleading before the heavenly court. Bat Tzion’s lament after the Temple’s destruction and Exile becomes a call for consolation.
Written through a period of profound personal loss and grounded in feminist hermeneutics from Phyllis Trible to Donna Haraway this book refuses easy answers. It asks instead how ancient silences might still be read – and rewritten – through the light of the present. Rigorous unflinching and deeply personal Daughters in Danger offers a new paradigm for understanding gender violence voice and silence in the biblical text and its long interpretive afterlife.
Similar Books
Nicholas of Lyra’s Commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
Franciscan Exegesis in a Time of Crisis
The Body
Lived, Cultured, Adorned: Essays on Dress and the Body in the Bible and Ancient Near East in Honor of Nili S. Fox
Apocrypha, Magic, Liturgy
The Multiple Identities of Coptic Prayers in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt
Athanasius of Alexandria, Epistula ad episcopos Aegypti et Libyae
Old Slavonic Version and English Translation
Volume 261
Contesting Labeled Identities
The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature
Cyril of Alexandria’s Christological Exegesis
Explorations of Partitive Exegesis in the Dialogues on the Trinity
Volume 70
Epiphanies of the Divine in the Septuagint and the New Testament
Fifth International Symposium of the Corpus Judaeo-Hellenisticum Novi Testamenti (CJHNT), 14-17 May 2015, Nottingham
Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land
Texts, Rituals, and Material Culture in Late Antique Palestine
From Joseph to Jesus
The Joseph Narrative as a Compositional Template from Old Greek Esther to the Gospel of Luke
Volume 125
Paradise Lost in Transmission
The Return to Eden in the Apocalypse of Peter within Its Ethiopic and Early Christian Contexts
