"ENGAGING BIBLICAL WOMEN": a new essay by Lillian Klein in Bible and Interpretation News. It summarizes her new book, From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). Excerpt:

���� As a girl, I sought to identify with the female characters of the Bible. It was difficult; they were confusing: subordinated and yet as independent as Sarah, misunderstood and mistreated as Dinah, heroic and unjustly punished as Miriam. As a woman, I became more interested in how those women were shown to cope with the constraints of their varied social situations: from ancestresses living in tents to Sheba and Esther, for instance, who dwelled in palaces; from the tensions of sibling rivalry as between Jacob�s wives to the tensions within ruling families, like those of Athaliah, mother of the king of Judah; from the many nameless women whose deeds are lost to them and to us�to those women who command our attention. As a student of literature, I have been fascinated with the allusiveness of biblical prose, always luring and never allowing the reader to reach an exclusive �truth.� Most recently, as a biblical scholar, I have sought to explore the possibilities of these various facets of interest through careful literary readings of several narratives. The result is From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible.