Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

Welcome to the strange and curious world of the study of biblical writings and readers! I’m excited to journey with you all as we encounter together the diverse ways that folk relate to an ancient (textual/cultural) past in the service of understanding their presents and imagining different futures. What are some of the categories used to appraise how we situate biblical texts in relation to their ancient (Israelite, Jewish, Greco-Roman and beyond) cultural backgrounds? What discourses and relations of power are at work in contemporary biblical and related scholarship? More broadly, how might we imagine the relationships we have with (any/all) texts, while growing in (self-)critical awareness of the ideological/contextual nature of engaging with the past? Come and discover! While the Bible is one of the cornerstones of Western Civilization, many folk today have little awareness of its contents or of the great role it has played in the development of human cultures. Fewer have an understanding of the Bible’s own development or of the vast critical literature that surrounds this most unusual collection/library of writings. The task of this course will be a modest attempt to improve this situation. Whether or not you have any religious interest in biblical writings, an understanding of history, literature, music, film, religious conflicts, and current electoral politics (among many other things) virtually requires some basic knowledge of the Bible and its readers. This course is therefore fundamental to your overall liberal arts training. The primary goal is to give you tools and experiences to understand the history and literature of biblical writings within the ancient contexts in which they flourished. While pursuing this goal, some efforts will be made to familiarize you with modern critical methods of biblical scholarship. I hope that by the end of the course you will not only have learned certain details of ancient history/literature but will have begun to appreciate this complex set of texts on a deeper level, and will have the ability to discern some of the ways in which our lives today are shaped by their powerful influence.

Student Outcomes

This course is aligned with the following departmental student outcomes. By the end of the term, you will be able to… • Understand how religious traditions have shaped—and are shaped in turn by— historical-cultural contexts. • Read, understand, and critically analyze religious texts (both oral and written) and artifacts from a number of different genres, registers, regions, epochs, languages, and cultural traditions. • Distinguish confessional or prescriptive statements about religion from descriptive or analytical statements.

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