Rhiannon Graybill shows herself a worthy inheritor of feminist biblical scholarship to build upon, poke holes in, push further, and complexify how rape tales have been read. Her "unhappy readings" of these tales take up feminist, queer, and strands of other theorization about sex, rape, rape culture, and power by reading through literature to situate the tales in the persistent misogyny that sadly still marks our own times.
Rhiannon Graybill is Marcus M. and Carole M. Weinstein and Gilbert M. and Fannie S. Rosenthal Chair of Jewish Studies and professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021) and Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016). She is the co-author (with John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie) of Jonah: A New Translation with Notes and Commentary (Yale Anchor Bible, 2023).