This special issue aims to explore, interrogate and reflect on the ways in which women are understood, contextualised and represented in the text of the Bible that has developed, in various ways, a foundational significance for Western culture. We welcome papers that could contribute to this discussion by addressing, for example, gendered relationships between the human and the divine; compulsory heterosexuality; sociology of gender in biblical texts; the pathologizing of women's experiences; reception of biblical texts; gendered violence in biblical texts; post-colonial approaches to gendered representations of biblical women or themes of transgression, embodiment, power, performance, emotion, redemption or loss within biblical narratives. The focus of the issue is on the complex relationships between biblical women and the worlds they inhabit - including the worlds into which they have been relocated through recreation and interpretation - in order to illuminate reframings of, and contested answers to, Simone de Beauvoir's question: "What is a woman?"