Ivy-League-Level Hebrew Bible Insights — Without the Price Tag!

It’s NOT “the Bible”; it’s NOT the New Testament, that’s for sure; but it isn’t quite the Old Testament, either. What is this thing that we’re going to spend the next fourteen weeks talking about? What is it that we’re reading when we read the Hebrew Bible? In this introductory session, we’ll explore the textual and material history of the Hebrew Bible, thinking about transmission, translation, and tradition, and perhaps realizing that there is no such thing as “the” Bible. 

There are many ways to read the Bible. For the last couple of centuries, the main way that scholars have read the Bible is using what we call “the historical-critical method,” which is just a fancy way of saying that we’re trying to understand how these texts may have communicated and what they may have meant in their earliest contexts. We are, depending on the text in question, some two to three thousand years removed from the world the Bible was composed in. What does it mean to try and recover those ancient contexts? What can the historical-critical method do for us—and what should we not be asking of it?

“In the beginning” may be how the Bible begins, but there was a lot of stuff out there in the world before the Bible began. Right from the opening chapter of Genesis, we find ourselves reading material that participates in a much broader ancient notion of cosmology and creation. In this session we’ll look carefully at Genesis 1, as well as its most important parallel (and precursor) from ancient Mesopotamia. And we’ll think about what it means for there to be writing out there that predates the Bible, that the Bible borrows from—and how to responsibly use comparative materials to shed light on the biblical text.

It doesn’t take long—just two chapters of Genesis—before the reader is faced with…let’s call them complications. Why doesn’t the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 seem to fit with the creation story from Genesis 1? Why are there two nearly identical genealogies in Genesis 4 and 5? Why is the Flood story so difficult to understand? In this session we’ll look at the text of Genesis 1–11 and realize that there isn’t one story here, but two. Two creations, two floods, two texts, two authors, two theologies, two narratives. Welcome to the Bible that was always right in front of you—if you know how to look for it.

Once we have established the basics of recognizing multiple sources in the text of the Pentateuch, we can step back and look at how the whole thing came together. This session will introduce in full the sources of the Pentateuch: their scholarly origins, their different approaches, and what understanding them can do for the contemporary reader. What does it mean that some stories seem to be known only to one of the biblical texts? How are we supposed to read a text that is anything but consistent?

Three patriarchs, four matriarchs, two concubines, twelve tribes, and a whole lot of family drama. Welcome to the Real Ancestors of Biblical Israel. In these chapters we get some of the most famous stories in the Bible (like, say, the sacrifice of Isaac) and some of the least famous (what do you mean you don’t remember Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine Bilhah?). These stories straddle the line between local affairs and international relations. What are we as readers to make of them? 

The Exodus never happened. There, I said it in the syllabus, so you won’t be surprised when I say it in class. What do we do with the Exodus story, certainly the most famous and influential part of the entire Hebrew Bible, once we have taken it out of the realm of the historical? What did the Exodus story do for ancient Israel, and what might it still do for us today? 

The revelation on Mount Sinai is the climax of the Pentateuch. It is also one of the only passages that every source of the Pentateuch shares in common. But it’s where the sources differ that the magic really happens. In this session we’ll use the Sinai narrative as a case study for both recognizing and appreciating the theological differences among the sources. We’ll think about what happens when we take the text apart into its constituent elements, and also what happens when we read it all together.

I know what you’re thinking. The best? More like the most unreadable of all books. And it’s okay: we can both be right. Leviticus gives us a remarkable window into an entire world of ancient Israelite thought—the world that’s really obsessed with bloody animal sacrifice. In our modern world, we don’t really know what to make of these rituals, or of the texts that describe them in such detail. But two thousand years ago they did—and that’s the perspective I’ll be sharing with you in this session. I’ll make the case that Leviticus, despite being unreadable, is also perhaps the most sustained and most beautiful theological idea in the entire Bible.

When one version of Israel’s history and laws isn’t enough, there’s always Deuteronomy to give it all to us again, just in the form of a very, very long speech by Moses. What is Deuteronomy up to? What is its relationship to the other books and sources of the Pentateuch? Despite feeling somewhat repetitious, Deuteronomy is in fact one of the central texts of the Hebrew Bible, and understanding it—and its historical setting—is crucial for reading much of what follows.

Over the course of the four books that follow the Pentateuch, we move from Joshua, Moses’s successor, to Josiah, the last great king of Israel; we go from the Israelite conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian conquest of Israel. We also go from the mythic past to something at least vaguely resembling actual historical events. There is a lot of disparate material in these books, but it’s all been brought together in a single conceptual framework. We’ll look at what this history is, and what it might have been trying to accomplish. In the end, we’ll see that what we have here is a history that is less about what happened and more about why.

After Moses was Joshua; before Israel had kings, it had judges. The first two books of the history give us wonderful stories about Israel’s early history—but stories is probably all they are. The big question here is how Israel actually came to settle in the promised land. The Bible tells us it was conquest; archaeology tells us otherwise. How might we reconstruct the actual history behind the text, and how might that history help us understand why the text looks the way it does?

David: the main character of the Hebrew Bible, no question about it. Who David really was in history? Lots of questions about it. In this session we will look at the portrayal of David in the books of Samuel and Kings, and think about why he is depicted the way he is. We’ll consider an alternative to the standard reading of David’s life, one that may be less familiar to us today but that may have been very recognizable to audiences three thousand years ago. You’ll never think about David the same way again.

Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiah; Ahab and Jezebel; Elijah and Elisha; the book of Kings is full of famous (and infamous) characters. But what about Jeroboam, Manasseh, and Jehoiachin? Maybe less well known, but also maybe just as important, at least as far as the biblical history is concerned. Though the details of the book of Kings may be hard to remember (even for professionals), the big picture presented here is the climax of the history: why do the kingdoms of Israel and Judah fall? What, in other words, is the relationship between history and theology, between what happens and why it happens?