Prof. Cynthia Chapman is the Adelia A. F. Johnston and Harry Thomas Frank Professor of Religion and the Chair of the Jewish Studies Program Committee at Oberlin College where she has taught biblical studies for eighteen years. She is the author of The House of the Mother: The Social Function of Maternal Kin in Biblical Hebrew Narrative and Poetry (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter (Eisenbrauns, 2004). She has also produced a course for the Teaching Company’s Great Courses series called The World of Biblical Israel and has served as co-editor with Michael D. Coogan on A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament and The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019). Her current research traces the growing importance of maternally specific kinship categories, including food-based kinship, during the post-exilic period in order to document the origins of defining Jewishness through the mother.