The present volume searches for different biblical perceptions of the wild, paying particular attention to the significance of fluid boundaries between the domestic and the wild, and to the options of crossing borders between them. Drawing on space, fauna, and flora, scholars investigate the ways biblical authors present the wild and the domestic and their interactions. In its six chapters and two responses, Hebrew Bible scholars, an archaeobotanist, an archaeologist, a geographer, and iconographers join forces to discuss the wild and its portrayals in biblical literature.The discussions bring to light the entire spectrum of real, imagined, metaphorized, and conceptualized forms of the wild that appear in biblical sources, as also in the material culture and agriculture of ancient Israel, and to some extent observe the great gap between biblical observations and modern studies of geography and of mapping that marks the distinctions between “the wilderness” and “the sown.” The book is the first written product presented on two consecutive years (2019, 2020) at the SBL Annual Meetings in the Section: “Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible.”

Contributed articles with reference to South Asia presented at fourth Regional Workshop of South Asia Forum for Human Rights held at Kathmandu, Nepal in 2003.

"Defining borders is a complex task, especially today as globalization accelerates at an unprecedented rate. We have entered a transnational age, one in which borders are more porous." So says Kimberly M. Grimes in Crossing Borders: Changing Social Identities in Southern Mexico, her investigation of migration to the United States from Putla de Guerrero, Oaxaca. Featuring testimonies of residents and migrants, Grimes allows local voices to describe the ways in which Putlecans find themselves negotiating among competing social values. The testaments of the Putlecans indicate that the changes occurring in their small town as a result of the circular migration to and from such immigrant enclaves as Atlantic City, New Jersey, are viewed with mixed emotions. Putlecans recognize the financial need to migrate north but they rue the increased consumerism, pollution, and trash that comes with the rising wealth. Men show off by driving their fancy cars with New Jersey tags around the tiny Mexican town, but influenced by Anglo culture, they also provide greater assistance in child care and housework. Women find the sexual and social freedoms of the United States liberating, but they still return home to baptize their babies. Grimes reminds us, however, that the Putlecans are not passive recipients of change but are actively embracing it, creating it, and mediating it. By reaching across the border to investigate migration, Grimes shows us that social and cultural change are not just the result of national and transnational influences, but are also locally negotiated phenomena.