REL 252 - Hebrew Bible

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirement HU.
Jews and Christians alike regard the books of the Hebrew Bible as scripture. Yet, modern scholarship has sought an alternative approach to understanding this complicated collection of ancient texts that sets aside its identification as revelation and attempts to grasp the historical, political, and cultural contexts that surrounded its composition. Consequently, this course will introduce students to the Hebrew Bible as a repository of ancient Israelite traditions that were developed and shaped in specific historical and social contexts. To that end, rather than read the Bible from front to back like a novel written of whole cloth, we will begin by reading the final portion of the Bible, known as the “Writings,” first and work our way back through the Prophets, finishing with the Torah. By doing this, we will examine first those biblical books that provide the clearest glimpse of the scribal practices that framed production of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, as well as its compositional complexity. In addition, students will place particular biblical passages in dialogue with texts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Moab, and Ugarit, illuminating Israel’s place in the religious and political world of the ancient Near East.