This volume sheds light on how particular constructions of the 'Other' contributed to an ongoing process of defining what 'Israel' or an 'Israelite' was, or was supposed to be in literature taken to be authoritative in the late Persian and Early Hellenistic periods. It asks, who is an insider and who an outsider? Are boundaries permeable? Are there different ideas expressed within individual books? What about constructions of the (partial) 'Other' from inside, e.g., women, people whose body did not fit social constructions of normalness? It includes chapters dealing with theoretical issues and case studies, and addresses similar issues from the perspective of groups in the late Second Temple period so as to shed light on processes of continuity and discontinuity on these matters. Preliminary forms of five of the contributions were presented in Thessaloniki in 2011 in the research programme, 'Production and Reception of Authoritative Books in the Persian and Hellenistic Period,' at the Annual Meeting of European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS).

Ehud Ben Zvi is Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Diana V. Edelman is Research Associate, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Abbreviations
Diana V. Edelman
Introduction
Jeremiah W. Cataldo
1. The Other: Sociological Perspectives in a Post-Colonial Age
Ehud Ben Zvi
2. 'Othering, Selfing, 'Boundarying' and 'Crossing-Boundarying' as Interwoven with Socially Shared Memories: Some Observations
Diana V. Edelman
3. YHWH's Othering of Israel
Kåre Berge
4. Categorical Identities: 'Ethnified Otherness and Sameness'-A Tool for Understanding Boundary Negotiation in the Pentateuch?
Mark G. Brett
5. Natives and Immigrants in the Social Imagination of the Holiness School
Claudia V. Camp
6. Gender and Identity in the Book of Numbers
Carey Walsh
7. Women on the Edge
Anne-Mareike Wetter
8. Ruth-A Born-Again Israelite? One Woman's Journey through Space and Time
Robert L. Cohn
9. Overcoming Otherness in the Book of Ruth
Terje Stordalen
10. Imagined and Forgotten Communities: Othering in the Story
of Josiah's Reform (2 Kings 23)
Suzanne Gilmayr-Bucher
11. Jonah and the Other: A Discourse on Interpretative Competence
Jean-Daniel Macchi
12. Denial, Deception or Force: How to Deal with Powerful Others in the Book of Esther
Tamara Cohn Eskenazi
13. Imagining the Other in the Construction of Judahite Identity in Ezra-Nehemiah
Tobias Funke
14. Phinehas and the Other Priests in Ben Sira and 1 Maccabees
Rebecca Raphael
15. Disability, Identity, and Otherness in Persian Period Israelite Thought
Anke Dorman
16. The Other Others-A Qumran Perspective on Disability
Bibliography