Esther J. Hamori teaches the popular class "Monster Heaven" at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she is a professor of Hebrew Bible. Specializing in biblical concepts of divine-human contact, and a lifelong devotee of all that is eerie, she is the author of Women's Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge, among other works. She has a PhD in Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East from New York University and an MDiv from Yale Divinity School.