Saul M. Olyan
Painstakingly researched, consistently engaging, compellingly argued, When Heroes Love is a work of exemplary scholarship that will be of great interest both to specialist and nonspecialist readers seeking a deeper and more nuanced understanding of ancient West Asian heroic literature and its erotic dimensions.
— Saul M. Olyan, Brown University, author of Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions
Susan Niditch
Susan Ackerman explores with her usual flair and creativity a hot topic in gender, eroticized portrayals of heroic twosomes in the ancient Near East. She engages recent and sometimes controversial scholarship and pays careful attention to details of language, style, narrative structure, and content, applying relevant methodologies from anthropology and women's studies. Ackerman seeks not only to understand the inner dynamic of these traditional tales but also to examine how such portrayals reflect a particular culture and worldview. At the same time, she is attentive to some of the recurring patterns that characterize all human experience, exploring how therite of passage and the coming of age is expressed in the traditional narrative media of the ancient Near East. This new work is an exciting and powerful contribution to the study of ancient Israelite culture.
— Susan Niditch, Amherst College, author of Folklore and the Hebrew Bible
