Like much twentieth-century feminist writing today, this book crosses the boundaries of genre. Biblical interpretation combines with fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. Politics joins with eroticism. Irreverence coexists with a yearning for the sacred. Scholarship contends with heresy. Most excitingly, the author continues and extends the tradition of arguing with God that commences in the Bible itself and continues now, as it has for centuries, to animate Jewish writing. The difference here is that the voice that debates with God is a woman's.

In her introduction, "Entering the Tents, " Ostriker defines the need to struggle against a tradition in which women have been silenced and disempowered - and to recover the female power buried beneath the surface of the biblical texts. In "The Garden, " she reinterprets the mythically complex stories of Creation. Then she considers the stories of "The Fathers, " from Abraham and Isaac to Moses, David, and Solomon - and their wives, mothers, and sisters. In "The Return of the Mothers, " she begins with a radical new interpretation of the book of Esther, includes a meditation on the silenced wife of Job and the idea of justice, and concludes with a fable on the death of God and a prayer to the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God. Ostriker refuses to dismiss the Bible as meaningless to women. Instead, in this angry, eloquent, visionary book, she attempts to recover what is genuinely sacred in these sacred texts.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Imaginary Lover, which won the 1986 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and The Crack in Everything, a 1996 nominee for the National Book Award. Her most recent book of prose is Feminist Revision and the Bible. She teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University.

All of us who are women poets, idol breakers, and revisionists . . . feel a deep kinship to the work of Alicia Ostriker, and a debt as well.

Alicia Ostriker combines her talents as poet, essayist, and literary critic in this witty and profound meditation on key narratives of the Hebrew Bible. . . .It is vital reading for anyone concerned with contemporary women's reimagining of the sacred.