The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Stories of the Bible by Jonathan Kirsch

It's about all those bizarre stories in the Old Testament that preachers never mention because nobody quite knows how to make sense of them. Examples:

Genesis 19: Lot offers his daughters to a mob of would-be rapists. Later, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the daughters get Lot drunk and rape him in order to get themselves pregnant.

Genesis 34: Shechem rapes Dinah, then wants to marry her. Dinah's father and brothers negotiate a marriage contract which requires Shechem and his whole tribe to get circumcised. They do so, but then Dinah's brothers attack Shechem's city and kill everyone.

Genesis 38: Tamar, a widow, wants one of her husband's brothers to impregnate her, in accordance with custom, but her father-in-law won't allow it. So Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and tricks her father-in-law into impregnating her himself.

Judges 11: Jephthah, bargaining for God's support in an upcoming battle, vows to make a sacrifice of whoever first greets him when he returns home. It turns out to be his daughter. Unlike the story of the Binding of Isaac, this one does not end happily.

Kirsch has no definitive answer to what these stories mean and why they are in the Bible, but he reviews all the commentary from the Talmud on down to the latest scholars.