Introduction

This chapter offers a concise assessment of developments in gender studies in the Hebrew Bible and shows how studying masculinity in the court tales of Daniel can advance this burgeoning area of scholarship. It also shows that what is at stake in this topic: failing to notice masculinity in these stories perpetuates the invisibility of masculinity, cloaking it as natural or normal rather than a product of cultural conventions and processes that change over time and across cultures. While the emergence of modern feminist biblical criticism is often associated with the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the late nineteenth century, feminist biblical scholarship has become an established part of biblical studies since the mid 1970s. Indeed, critiquing the androcentrism of the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation has been a mainstay of feminist biblical scholarship. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.