Content area
Full text
Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, editors Michael Fishbane, Consulting Editor The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 2181 pages.
This admirable contribution to the growing library of Jewishly informed aids to Bible study designed for a general audience occupies a newly opened place on the shelf. It offers a completely annotated Tanakh, using the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation. This is supplemented by introductions to each individual book and by numerous essays exploring Jewish interpretation of the Bible, period by period; the Bible in Jewish life and thought; backgrounds for reading the Bible; and questions of language and textual transmission. Also included are a glossary, tables and charts, chronologies, maps, and a variety of other aids to study. In short, this is an enormous undertaking, a full study Bible produced for the first time from specifically Jewish academic scholarship. The editors' stated goals are twofold: (1) to convey the best of modern academic scholarship on the Bible, based on the conviction that "this approach does not undermine Judaism . . . but can add significant depth to Jewish belief and values"; and (2) to reflect as broadly as possible "the range of Jewish engagement with Bible over the past two and a half millennia." The contributors make use of a variety of approaches, but all attempt to combine in some way the most up-to-date academic scholarship with awareness of and sensitivity to traditional Jewish interpretation and to the role of the Bible and of specific biblical texts in Jewish life.
Since the editors present this volume as a product of "state-of-the-art scholarship," feminist readers naturally hope to find that its contributors incorporate the wealth of feminist Bible scholarship, whether in the extensive annotations that accompany the text or in the essay materials. In a fine essay entitled "Jewish Women's Scholarly Writings on the Bible," Adele Reinhartz asserts at the outset that "recent biblical scholarship has been witness to the growing visibility of women scholars and the profound impact of feminist criticism." The Jewish Study Bible does exemplify the first aspect of this claim in a serious way. Women scholars are significantly represented as authors of essays, annotators of individual biblical books, and, of course, as one...