Susan Niditch is the Samuel Green Professor of Religion at Amherst College. She was educated at Harvard University, where her teachers, Albert Bates Lord, Frank Moore Cross, Paul D. Hanson, and Isadore Twersky, deeply influenced her scholarly interests and approaches. Her areas of research and teaching include the study of ancient Israelite literature from the perspectives of folklore and oral-traditional studies; biblical ethics with special interests in war, gender, and the body; the reception history of the Bible; and study of the rich symbolic media of biblical ritual texts. Her most recent books are The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods (Yale University Press, 2015) and Jonah: A Commentary (Hermeneia Series, 2022).
"""Can we find ethical guidance in the Hebrew Bible in the midst of its stories about war, rape, enslavement, and heteronormativity? Susan Niditch, one of today's foremost scholars, offers a complex navigation that wrestles with the troubling aspects of biblical ethics, pointing to ambiguities in the language but also illuminating elements that inspire."" * Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College * ""A volume to be admired by both experts and lay readers! Susan Niditch brings brilliance and profound knowledge to bear on perennial ethical questions addressed in the Bible and grapples with troubling texts. She interweaves perspicacious analysis of current scholarship with trenchant readings of texts, and at her command is Jewish and Christian interpretation of Scripture, both classical and contemporary. This is the work of a lifetime's reflection on ethics."" * Pamela Barmash, author of The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Tradition * Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals. * Choice *"