You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Serious talk about the sacred book. I'm Pete Ends. And I'm Jared Byeth.

Welcome everybody to this week's episode of our podcast. And our topic today is something called

Womanist Midrash. And we have as our guest someone who knows an awful lot about that. Her name is

Will Gaffney. She is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Bright Divinity School, which is

in Fort Worth, Texas. And she's written a number of books, one of which is going to be big in our topic

today called Womanist Midrash, a reintroduction to the women of the Torah and the throne, which are

the two halves of the Bible. The first half is Torah and the second half is what happens when Israel

becomes a monarchy. She's written a commentary on Nehum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah. She also has a book

called Daughters of Miriam, Women, Prophets, and Ancient Israel. So we had a great time talking

with Will, didn't we? It was really enlightening. I learned a tremendous amount.

We don't say that just to be nice and stuff because there's a lot of stuff we don't know.

And one thing that's fun for us about doing podcasts is that we learn things from every single

person we have on because they have expertise in areas we don't. And they have lives that we don't

have and experiences we don't have. And we all learn from that together. And that's the fun part

of doing this podcast. That and the fame and fortune. I hope my pastor doesn't listen to this,

but oftentimes in church I find myself sort of getting to that place where you're like,

oh, I think I've heard this before. Well, he's a horrible preacher anyway.

What's his name again? That's right. No, yeah. I'm not going to tell you.

But I think that's, you know, and that's what it is what I love about the podcast. And particularly

this one where your ears perk up and you start saying, wow, this is fascinating. Things that

I've never seen in the Bible before. And you know, you talked about it in the episode of how many

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