Author: Rhiannon Graybill
Reviewer: Marvin A. Sweeney
Rhiannon Graybill. Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 200 pp. $78.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-022736-4.
Reviewed by Marvin A. Sweeney (Claremont School of Theology)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2018)
Commissioned by Katja Vehlow
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51533
Rhiannon Graybill’s monograph on unstable masculinity in the prophets is based on her recent University of California Berkeley PhD dissertation supervised by Robert Alter, Daniel Boyarin, Chana Kronfeld, and Celeste Langan. I normally do not mention full committees in reviews, but this committee includes no full Bible scholars, even if some of them, for example, Alter, have extensive experience with Bible. Alter is a comparative literature scholar; Boyarin is a Talmudist; Kronfeld is a scholar of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature; and Langan in a specialist in English literature. But Graybill’s research is frequently limited by her selection of often out-of-date scholarly literature and her failure to contextualize many of the Bible passages that she studies. Although she raises appropriate questions, her discussions often do not provide full consideration of the biblical and scholarly literature that such a project demands.
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