Megilloth Studies: The Shape of Contemporary Scholarship

This volume brings together two years of papers read to the Megilloth Consultation Group at the Annual Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature; it represents some of the most recent work being done by a group of international scholars on the collection of Hebrew Bible books known as the Megilloth.

Although the individual books of the Megilloth have received ample academic attention in contemporary scholarship, relatively little has been done to situate them under this broader rubric. To this end, the present volume addresses a range of issues associated with studying the five scrolls, such as the internal relationship between the books themselves, intertextual connections between the five scrolls and other portions of the Hebrew Bible, gender and ethnic concerns in the five scrolls, and the theological commitments and contours of the collection. Several of the papers and the volume itself also intentionally wrestle with the viability of the category ‘Megilloth’ as a meaningful term in academic studies of these writings.

In addition to papers on the Megilloth in general (Galvin, Stone, Fullerton Strollo), there are studies on Esther (Davis, Greenspoon, Avnery, Peters, three of them in relation to Ruth), Lamentations (Gruber and Yona, Flanders) and Qoheleth (Weeks).