ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualizes four issues facing gender studies in the Hebrew Bible and demonstrates their significance. The issues are methodological issue of how to study gender in biblical literature, the fit of the topic of masculinity in biblical studies, the socio-political interests served through studying masculinity in biblical texts, and the implications of depicting a character transgressing predominant gendered norms. The chapter offers some parameters for making claims about gender in narrative texts from the Hebrew Bible and evaluating the cogency of such arguments. Content analyses of media in the modern world consistently find that characters typically conform to the gendered norms that the researchers knew at the beginning of the study. Scholars who work from the perspective that gendered norms are cultural conventions that do not naturally flow from or adhere to particular bodies should expect that characters in texts will deviate from gendered expectations.
