Elisha

Israelite women are conspicuously absent from the Decalogue’s Shabbat law. Three stories in the Prophets featuring female characters—Rahab the prostitute, the great woman of Shunem, and Queen Athaliah—each tie to Shabbat in some unconventional way.

Biblical tradition often depicts difficult father and son relationships. Accordingly, the concluding verses of Malachi—the final book of the Prophets—imagines ultimate redemption through a metaphor of father-son reconciliation, in which the fire and brimstone prophet Elijah is its unlikely harbinger. Leave it to the poet Yehuda Amichai to step in and offer a counter-model to rescue the metaphor.

Virtually all biblical scholars—even feminist biblical scholars—consider the Bible and ancient Israelite society patriarchal. But is that a valid designation?

And the challenges of putting it into practice.

In the Prophets, Israelite leaders such as Joshua, Saul, David, and Ahab use divination to help them make decisions, just as their ancient Near Eastern counterparts did. The Torah sidesteps the divinatory character of these objects and practices, and instead, emphasizes their ritual and religious character.