Esther Brownsmith explores questions of gender and violence in the Old Testament in her new award-winning book, Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor.
Brownsmith, assistant professor of Hebrew Bible in the Department of Religious Studies, became immersed in the Bible at a young age, attending biblical studies conventions with her parents, who created Accordance Bible study software.
She saw “scholarship in action” at these events, inspiring her to pursue an academic career as a religious scholar.
“I see myself as an activist, and the reason I do biblical studies is because I feel that through it I can change the world,” she said. “I feel like the Bible is still so relevant to how people understand the world.
“I am especially interested in questions of gender and violence within the Hebrew Bible, and I wanted to look at passages that describe violence against women and understand what were the underlying metaphors that made these passages so resonant,” Brownsmith said.
Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor — released as part of The Ancient Word series from Routledge, the world's leading academic publisher in the humanities and social sciences — explores the conceptual metaphor of women as food in three biblical passages. Through a text analysis approach called “philology,” she examines the context and sociocultural meanings of the texts.
“I found that in the three texts I looked at, all three stories of violence against women had acted on an underlying conceptual metaphor of woman as something to be consumed,” Brownsmith said.
Her book was one of five to receive a 2023 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. The association awards funds to recipients to help with publishing costs.
Brownsmith used the remaining funds to make her book delayed Open Access, which means that after one year on the market, anyone can freely read it.