Description

Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture brings together an innovative collection of essays highlighting fresh scholarly insights into trans biblical interpretation. This groundbreaking volume explores central issues from multiple angles, offering readers diverse and compelling answers to the fundamental questions: “What makes a biblical reading trans?” and “What makes a trans reading biblical?” The contributors represent a variety of gender identities and offer new lenses through which to understand gender diversity within ancient contexts, also engaging explicitly and critically with contemporary conversations and tensions around gender and bodily expression.

The essays presented in this volume provide pathways for biblical readers and interpreters to discover creative, reflective, and responsible engagements with influential scriptural texts and traditions. Gender diversity is not a modern innovation; it has been intertwined with stories of human origins and experiences since the beginning. Biblical texts themselves can challenge and unsettle contemporary assumptions about stable, binary categories of gender—categories frequently wielded against trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming individuals today.

Ranging from Genesis and moving through the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, New Testament epistles, and finally into early Christian and rabbinic traditions, Trans Biblical enriches our understanding of textual possibilities, sharpening readers’ perception of what these ancient texts can convey. Ultimately, this timely and essential collection highlights the vibrant and evolving field of trans biblical studies, providing an accessible, thoughtful, and theoretically sophisticated set of resources for anyone engaging deeply with biblical interpretation and traditions in our present moment.