Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them, Susan Ackerman, Eerdmans, 2022 (ISBN 978‐0‐8028‐7956‐1), xiv + 304 pp., hb $59.99

It is always refreshing to learn how an academic's perspective changes over the years, and, in this publication, Ackerman traces the development of her interests, noting that she remains convinced by some of her earlier claims while updating others. She explains how and why she arrived at graduate study of the Hebrew Bible, which combined her youthful interests in ancient history and religion with ‘a certain feisty streak’ that explains her long interest in ‘the outliers and even the renegades of ancient Israelite religion’ (p. xi). With the benefit of hindsight, she detects how and why her corpus of material developed in connection with her long-standing but mutable interests as she traces ‘the different yet interrelated directions my analyses have taken over the years’ (p. xii). So, while the book is a collection of previously published work, it is also a metacommentary upon it. She achieves this by providing short introductions to each chapter before presenting the revised content. She has deleted material ‘about which I no longer feel as confident or with which I no longer agree’ (p. xii) while updating and polishing her ideas so that each chapter presents something old yet new. I hope more publishers provide avenues for such volumes as they help students see scholars as always-becoming: experts in their fields who are not afraid to change their mind