Claudia V. Camp

This is a fascinating book with a very original view of the importance of women to the various stories and myths that came to be combined (with great difficulty) into the work we now know as the Hebrew Bible. I have just finished it and it will take me sometime to fully digest what is a very dense work. What interested me most and what will occupy much of my thinking about the book is the question of what it is to be a follower of YHWH to pre-dynastic Jews, Jews in the Kingdom of Israel, show more Jews in the divided nations (Israel & Judah), exiled Jews, the Jews left behind by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Jews who returned from exile, the Jews who did not return, and the Jews under Greek and Roman rule. Camp takes a new and exciting definition of the relationship between the 'wise woman' and the 'strange woman' in in the book of Proverbs. She sees this as a dialectic on what it means to be a follower of YHWH rather than a dichotomy. This gives a new importance to both women, but especially to the 'strange woman.' This new vision of how the authors of the Hebrew Bible struggled to define what it means to be a Jew is painfully trenchant today, as demonstrated by books such as, "We Look Like the Enemy: the Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands" by Rachel Shabi. It also demonstrates that - for a religion based on ethnic purity, fidelity to a highly complex legal system, and the proper observance of ritual and worship - the definition of what defines one as a member of the religion will always be fraught with great confusion, controversy, conflict, racial prejudice, cultural tension, and outright conflict. show less