This kind of rhetoric illustrates the difficulty of queer theory's goal of breaking down binaries. The world ends up divided into those who break down binaries, and those who don't. This dishearteningly reinscribes the classic Christian binary of spiritual, universal Christianity versus legalistic, intolerant Judaism. Superior Christianity is now animated by ''the queer Spirit'' ( 202), but it is still the Jews who are portrayed as enemies of the spirit. In this light it is not insignificant that only one author in this book, S. Tamar Kamionkowski, writes from an explicitly Jewish perspective, in a very brief response to the other essays (''Queer Theory and Historical Exegesis,'' 131-136), while several write as Christian theologians and the New Testament gets more attention than the longer Hebrew Scriptures.These failures of compassion and imagination, however, do not eliminate the value of this book. The authors interrogate the Bible and its interpreters in the light of sophisticated understandings of power and the construction of boundaries. And they explore the text through the lived experiences of stone butches (Deryn Guest, ''From Gender Reversal to Genderfuck,'' 11), drag queens (Ken Stone, ''Queer Reading between Bible and Film,'' 77-89), male prisoners who have sex with each other without identifying as gay (Havea, 162), trans activists who reject a defined gender identity (Joseph A. Marchal, ''The Corinthian Woman Prophets and Trans Activism,'' 236) and other queer people-sometimes based on the authors' research, sometimes on their own lives. Through these godwrestlings, they create an exhilaratingly liberating vision of the Bible and the world, in which ''queerness is to heterosexuality as the ocean is to a wave'' (Hornsby and Stone, xii).