In the wake of Tikva Frymer-Kensky

"The late Tikva Frymer-Kensky's In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth set its sights audaciously high by repeatedly posing large questions, questions as pungently topical for the theology colloquium as for the Bible seminar: What was the relationship of Yahwistic monotheism to the cults of many gods in Canaan and points East? Can the religions of the ancient Near East, including radical monotheism, be productively read as a matter of projection from the human to the divine plane? Religiously speaking, just what does it mean to have a gender? And what is the balance sheet for nature as well as humankind when all gods and goddesses are compacted into a single deity, especially a biblical God who, in Frymer-Kensky's words, "is not imagined below the waist"? It is the grand questions posed within the humanistic tradition by her study that imbue this 1990s period-piece with an immediacy and a functionality in the classroom that other such studies generally lack. This volume consists of 14 sparkling papers delivered by Assyriologists and biblical specialists at the 2007 Society of Biblical Literature congress in sessions devoted to the scholarly legacy of Tikva Frymer-Kensky."--Publisher's website.