From Publishers Weekly
Here acclaimed poet Alicia Ostriker both rereads the Bible from the "controversial perspective of a twentieth-century Jewish woman" and creatively interacts with it form a fiercely autobiographical point of view. What results is not another academic explication of the Bible's symbolic and psychological meanings but an imaginative and spiritual dialogue with characters and narratives of the Old Testament. Throughout, Ostriker's goal is to explore her own emotional universe via this "conversation" while at the same time using her impressive literary skills to tell the story of the Bible's often nameless women (e.g., Job's wife who, according to the story, had her children slain as a test of her husband's devotion to God and then had them replaced by ten new children.) Indeed, exploring the Bible's female characters' responses to the challenges that confront them becomes, in Ostriker's hands, a way of further humanizing the Bible for both men and women.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Ostriker describes this work as standing in the tradition of midrash, "stories based on Biblical stories," composed not for scholars but for an entire community. It is an impressive collection of poetic variations on texts from Genesis through Job, often taking the perspective of women silenced in the texts themselves. She quotes "the rabbis" as saying of Torah, "Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it." The range of experience revealed here, the disciplinary boundaries crossed, and the stories reconceived lend credence to that claim. Ostriker turns and turns through her own experience; through the creation; through the children of Noah; through Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Ishmael; through Rebecca, Rachel, Moses, Miriam, Aaron, Ruth, Esther, and David; through Job's wife; to the dying of a God who will not die, as revealed in the Shekhinah--God's presence, which is feminine. It is said that "if two sit together and the words between them are of Torah . . . the Shekhinah is in their midst." In the writing and the reading of this book, there is certainly Shekhinah. Steve Schroeder
