Crossing Borders between the Domestic and the Wild: Space, Fauna, and Flora [Paperback]

The present volume searches for different biblical perceptions of the wild, paying particular attention to the significance of fluid boundaries between the domestic and the wild, and to the options of crossing borders between them. Drawing on space, fauna, and flora, scholars investigate the ways biblical authors present the wild and the domestic and their interactions. In its six chapters and two responses, Hebrew Bible scholars, an archaeobotanist, an archaeologist, a geographer, and iconographers join forces to discuss the wild and its portrayals in biblical literature.The discussions bring to light the entire spectrum of real, imagined, metaphorized, and conceptualized forms of the wild that appear in biblical sources, as also in the material culture and agriculture of ancient Israel, and to some extent observe the great gap between biblical observations and modern studies of geography and of mapping that marks the distinctions between the wilderness and the sown. The book is the first written product presented on two consecutive years (2019, 2020) at the SBL Annual Meetings in the Section: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible.Examines different notions of the wild in the Hebrew Bible

Dalit Rom-Shiloniis Professor of Biblical Studies at Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Mark J. Bodais Professor of Old Testament at McMaster Divinity College, Canada.

[This] is a stellar first volume in what promises to be a ground-breaking book series for biblical studies' engagement with the natural sciences. Religious Studies Review

This volume models the kind of multidisciplinary collaboration that is vital to contemporary biblical scholarship. With exegetical precision it challenges dichotomies  between humans and nonhumans, domestic and wild  that have been dangerously absolutized by the industrialized mindset. Because that challenge is articulated in language accessible to non-experts, it merits wide usage byló!