THE TORAH: A WOMEN'S COMMENTARY is featured in the London Times:

Spare-rib scholars unearth scripture bias
Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem

In the days when Moses dictated the law of the land, the five daughters of Zelophephad took issue with the rules of inheritance. The Book of Numbers xxvii recounts how the sisters sought counsel with Moses in front of the congregation of travelling Israelites to demand that the laws be altered to accommodate female succession.

This bit of biblical history is often brushed over, as are other feminist aspects of the Old Testament, because for thousands of years men alone have interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures, according to a feminist revision of the text.

The Torah: A Women's Commentary re-evaluates the Torah's feminine side and offers the first comprehensive analysis of text from a female point of view. “With this commentary we will continue as sisters to empower the women - and men - who come after us for generations to come,” said its chief editor, Tamara Eskenazi, a professor of Bible studies at Hebrew Union College.

The Torah - also known as the Pentateuch or five books of Moses - is the foundational text of Judaism. While scholars have begun to examine women's role in the biblical period, A Women's Commentary is being hailed as a seminal text in religious studies owing to the depth of its analysis and wide spectrum of its contributors - which include several hundred women from the four main branches of Jewish movements - Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist. Those women re-evaluated the text from page one - taking the story of Creation to task for its rendering of Eve as a secondary creation to God's original Adam.

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