Excluded from the community?

All the essays in this collection reflect in some manner the author’s ongoing interest in literary operations of classification and their social implications, particularly the production of distinctions which create social inequality in the world of the text, and have the potential to generate hierarchical social relationships in contexts where biblical texts might have had an impact on real people. The author introduces each of the sections, contextualizing every essay in his larger scholarly project, reflecting on its development and reception and, in some cases, responding to his critics.

This volume presents a selection of fifteen essays on social inequalities in the Hebrew Bible dealing with e.g. social status, gender, sexuality, disability, holiness, death and afterlife.