The Hebrew Bible and Old Testament are literary collections that modern Jewish and Christian traditions maintain as important, but these collections were initially produced by ancient Israelite scribes who composed and/or compiled the biblical texts at particular time periods in the ancient Near East. This course will introduce the academic study of biblical texts, which demands critical analysis of the literature and an openness to reading the literature from the perspective of ancient Israelite writers (who lived in a world far different from today). The course will spend considerable time on the literary (and scribal) composition of biblical prose texts. In the fall semester of 2018 we will also spend some time on selected topics, where we will ask: What did the ancient Israelites think about x or y (topics to be determines). Our main goal is to attempt to understand the biblical texts the way the first readers of these texts might have understood them, but in the fall of 2018 this course will also address the re-interpretations in Jewish or Christian traditions. In other words we will also take a look at how some biblical texts and motives have been understood and used later, even today. You will learn how to read texts closely, to think critically about the meaning of a text, and to differentiate between what the texts say and what later times have understood the texts to say.
This course fulfills the Liberal Education Requirement of Literature in that the course examines the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as ancient literature, asking questions about its language and meaning in its social and historical contexts.