Prophecy is a legitimate religious practice, and divination is not. Likewise, “religion” entails an appropriate posture and set of practices vis-à-vis the deity, whereas “magic” is an illicit practice. Such was the state of the discussion in biblical scholarship until recently, when the lines between these categories began to break down. Divination, which Esther Hamori defines as “any type of action culturally understood to allow acquisition of knowledge otherwise restricted to the divine realm” (4), is an umbrella term under which all of these phenomena and practices, including prophecy, may be considered. In this robust and lucid work, Hamori advances our understanding of divination in general, and of women's participation in divination, in particular.

The book is divided into two main parts. The first part is much shorter, and introduces both divination as a phenomenon and the general contours of women's participation in divination in the ancient world. The second, much longer, section looks at specific cases of women engaging in divination in the Hebrew Bible.

In the first section, Hamori suggests that divination requires at least one of three elements: intent, interpretation, and/or the special identity of the diviner. Only one of these elements is absolutely required to meet the definition of divination, but Hamori is careful to exclude from the category the “casual divine-human conversation” (6) characteristic of the patriarchs, for example. Thus, while divination becomes a broad umbrella for understanding special access to the divine realm, it does not encompass all divine-human communication. While prophecy in the Hebrew Bible has been a topic of much scholarly discussion, only a few women are associated with prophecy. Yet many more women in the Bible are associated with other forms of divination, making them an excellent topic for further study.

Despite all the caveats required in using literary texts as evidence for discerning divinatory practices, and the complexities of sifting male bias both in the production and interpretation of biblical texts, Hamori observes that at “a minimum, … the image of the female diviner had a notable place in the Israelite cultural imagination” (17). In the second chapter of this first section of the book, Hamori problematizes a number of binaries on which much of the scholarly discussion has depended until recently: religion and magic, prophecy and divination, official cult and popular religion, true and false prophecy, public men and private women, and male and female. The section ends with a review of the major scholarship that has examined women prophets in the Bible, and sets Hamori's work in the context of that literature.

The second section attends to women's divinatory practices as they appear in (Jewish) canonical order (this method is defended in section 1). Women associated with divination who receive their own chapters include: Rebekah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, the necromancer of En-dor, the “wise women” of 2 Samuel, Huldah, the prophet in Isaiah 8:3 who bears a son, the women in Ezekiel 13, the women in Joel, and Noadiah, who is mentioned in Nehemiah. The last two chapters address women who are not directly associated with divination, but who have loose connections to divinatory practices and so merit some discussion.

Here I have space to reflect on only one of these chapters. Hamori offers a positive reading of the necromancer of En-dor, reading her as a “ghost-diviner” (and rightly eschewing the appellation “witch,” still in vogue in some scholarly quarters), and calls out those interpreters who allude to her being foreign and/or sexually assertive, neither of which is supported by the text. But the best part of this chapter is where Hamori solves the crux of 1 Samuel 28:12. No modern biblical scholar has satisfactorily explained why the necromancer only recognizes Saul at the moment when Samuel's ghost appears, but Hamori, by slightly repointing one word (from “the woman saw Samuel” to “the woman feared Samuel”), offers a compelling reading that makes sense of the literary context: the necromancer remembers Samuel's condemnation of divination (1 Samuel 15:23), Saul's subsequent efforts to expel mediums from the land, and Samuel's refusal to forgive Saul for his failings. As Hamori observes, “No wonder [the necromancer] fears Samuel and not Saul!”

Hamori correctly observes that the necromancer possesses both agency and authority in the story—it is she who provides access to YHWH's message, after all. Furthermore, Hamori points out that the text itself offers no condemnation of either the necromancer or necromancy—the narration of the episode offers no comment on the legitimacy of the practice, but takes it for granted (128–130). This is an observation worthy of remark, to be sure. Yet the attention Hamori gives to the narrative's perspective—whether the text itself approves or disapproves of women's religious practices—stands in some tension with her methodological critique of other scholarly work in the first section of the book. There she criticizes the tendency among some scholars to “redeem” biblical women characters, and especially women prophets (35–40). She notes, for example, Wilda Gafney's concern that modern restrictions on women find their authority in biblical depictions of women prophets. Hamori sees this concern at least partly reflected in Gafney's “framing of her book with blessings upon the reader” (38). Hamori distinguishes herself from these efforts in that she “sees no systematic presentation of female diviners and no consistent authorial concern behind the texts” (39). There may be no consistency, but the concern to note whether or not the text approves or disapproves of women's religious practices sneaks into Hamori's analysis by the back door. Admitting that the narrative's perspective on events is of some importance (because of one's own religious commitment or because of the Bible's authority in contemporary communities) is not a defect in scholarly work, if properly named.

The most obvious strength of Hamori's work is the broadened scope of the investigation. While there are at least three other major works on women and biblical prophecy (Irmtraud Fischer, Gotteskünderinnen: Zu einer geschlechterfairen Deutung des Phänomens der Prophetie und der Prophetinnen in der Hebräischen Bibel [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002]; Klara Butting, Prophetinnen Gefragt: Die Bedeutung der Prophetinnen im Kanon aus Tora und Prophetie, Biblisch-feministische Texte 3 [Knesebeck: Erev-Rav, 2001]; Wilda C. Gafney, Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008]), they generally do not look at the broader phenomena encompassed by divination. Hamori's methodology is in general clear, the arguments cogent, and the readings of texts exegetically sensitive, compelling, and thought provoking. This volume will be a wonderful resource in both teaching and research, and the standard reference on women's divinatory practices in the Hebrew Bible for some time to come.