Mieke Bal 
Anti-Covenant [PDF ebook] 
Counter-Reading Women’s Lives in the Hebrew Bible

This collection of essays from feminist Biblical scholars including Carol Delaney, Rachel C. Rasmussen, Cynthia Baker and Mieke Bal, starts from the premise that reading is always in the plural. It is never just the text alone that is read, but also the scholarly meta-text. The essays encourage the reader to challenge his or her presuppositions that she has brought to an analysis of the Hebrew Bible, before returning the scrutiny to the text and using a narratological approach to investigate. This insight raises such questions as: who speaks? who sees? and who acts? This now familiar means of analysing texts has lost none of its power to demand answers otherwise not forthcoming. The essays provide a rigorous re- assessment of familiar stories of the Hebrew Bible and suggest we encourage the practice of a hermeneutics of suspicion.