by Rachel E. Adelman (Author)

Daughters in Danger confronts one of the most unsettling patterns in the Hebrew Bible: the daughter, again and again, is sacrificed, raped, silenced, or erased, while sons are spared. Where the Binding of Isaac ends with God staying Abraham's hand, no such rescue comes for Jephthah's daughter, or for Dinah (the patriarch Jacob's daughter), or for Tamar (King David's daughter). Adelman reads these dark stories not to redeem her subjects as pure victims, nor to turn away in dismay, but to "stay with the trouble" - tracing the complexity, ambiguity, and buried agency within the narratives that have flattened women into ciphers of honor and shame.

Moving from Genesis through Exodus, Judges, Samuel, Lamentations, and into the Maccabean era, Adelman pairs each biblical text with its afterlife in classical rabbinic midrash and contemporary feminist reinterpretation - giving voice to daughters the Bible itself often leaves silent. Dinah's wordless assault becomes, in modern midrash, a story reclaimed. Jephthah's sacrificed daughter is transformed into an intercessor pleading before the heavenly court. Bat Tzion's lament after the Temple's destruction and Exile becomes a call for consolation.

Written through a period of profound personal loss, and grounded in feminist hermeneutics from Phyllis Trible to Donna Haraway, this book refuses easy answers. It asks instead how ancient silences might still be read - and rewritten - through the light of the present. Rigorous, unflinching, and deeply personal, Daughters in Danger offers a new paradigm for understanding gender, violence, voice and silence in the biblical text and its long interpretive afterlife.