Introduction

Although postcolonial approaches to the Bible were first broached by Hebrew Bible scholars, it has been some time since a volume of collected essays on the Hebrew Bible has been produced. In the hypermarket of academic fashions, a decade seems like an eternity. So when one writes “in the early days” of postcolonial criticism, it designates barely more than a decade and a half, yet within that time and in the vast swirl of possible approaches to biblical interpretation, let alone the wider field of literary criticism, postcolonial criticism has established itself as a major approach in biblical studies. Two other streams have combined to cement postcolonial criticism in such a dominant position