Women, Travel and Transformation from the Bible to Bar-Kokhba

This book provides a novel, cultural-historical perspective on travel in the ancient world by exploring a wide range of women’s (in)voluntary journeys and relocations, such as can be derived from passing references, short sections, and extended narratives found in the early Jewish corpora that remain to us.

The selected sources include a large body of literary texts from the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and the New Testament, together with some documentary sources indicating the existence of certain types of travel up until early second century CE. They reveal a variety of mobile girls and women such as brides, businesswomen, captives, diplomats, diviners, economic and forced migrants, knowledge-seekers, midwives, musicians, nurses, pilgrims, refugees, sages, (semi)nomads, slaves, tourists, and war leaders. The book delivers a more nuanced notion of the past by challenging and demonstrating the need to move beyond the binary idea of “female stayers” and “male movers.” In doing so, it foregrounds a previously overlooked aspect of travel history: female mobility, its many facets and inherent complexity as a sociocultural phenomenon, and its multiple transformational effects.

Women, Travel and Transformation from the Bible to Bar-Kokhba is of interest to students and scholars working on travel history, early Jewish literature, and women in antiquity, as well as those in biblical studies, religious studies, ancient history, and classics.