Professor Christine
Hayes: You don't need me to
tell you that human civilization
is very, very old.
Nevertheless,
our knowledge of the earliest
stages of human civilization was
quite limited for many
centuries.
That is, until the great
archaeological discoveries of
the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries,
which unearthed for us the
great civilizations of the
Ancient Near East,
of which I have drawn a
remarkably life-like map here on
the board: [laughter]
Mediterranean,
I always start with the
Mediterranean Ocean,
the Nile River,
the Tigris and the Euphrates.
So: the great civilizations of
ancient Egypt,
Mesopotamia and the area we
refer to as the Fertile
Crescent,
of which a little part here
about the size of Rhode Island
is Canaan.
And archaeologists in the
nineteenth and twentieth
centuries were stunned to find
the ruins and the records of
remarkable peoples and
cultures--massive,
complex empires in some cases
but some of which had completely
disappeared from human memory.
 
Their newly uncovered languages
had been long forgotten;
their rich literary and legal
texts were now indecipherable.
That soon changed.
 
But because of those
discoveries, we are now in a
position to appreciate the
monumental achievements of these
early civilizations,
these earliest
civilizations.
And so many scholars,
and many people,
have remarked that it's not a
small irony that the Ancient
Near Eastern people with one of
the,
or perhaps the most
lasting legacy,
was not a people that built and
inhabited one of the great
centers of Ancient Near Eastern
civilization.
It can be argued that the
Ancient Near Eastern people with
the most lasting legacy is a
people that had an idea.
 
It was a new idea that broke
with the ideas of its neighbors,
and those people were the
Israelites.
And scholars have come to the
realization that despite the
Bible's pretensions to the
contrary,
the Israelites were a small,
and I've actually
overrepresented it here,
I'm sure it should be much
smaller,
a small and relatively
insignificant group for much of
their history.
They did manage to establish a
kingdom in the land that was
known in antiquity as Canaan
around the year 1000.
They probably succeeded in
subduing some of their
neighbors, collecting
tribute--there's some
controversy about that--but in
about 922 this kingdom divided
into two smaller and lesser
kingdoms that fell in
importance.
The northern kingdom,
which consisted of ten of the
twelve Israelite tribes,
and known confusingly as
Israel, was destroyed in 722 by
the Assyrians.
The southern kingdom,
which consisted of two of the
twelve tribes and known as
Judah,
managed to survive until the
year 586 when the Babylonians
came in and conquered and sent
the people into exile.
 
The capital, Jerusalem, fell.
 
Conquest and exile were events
that normally would spell the
end of a particular ethnic
national group,
particularly in antiquity.
 
Conquered peoples would trade
their defeated god for the
victorious god of their
conquerors and eventually there
would be a cultural and
religious assimilation,
intermarriage.
 
That people would disappear
as a distinctive entity,
and in effect,
that is what happened to the
ten tribes of the northern
kingdom to a large degree.
They were lost to history.
 
This did not happen to those
members of the nation of Israel
who lived in the southern
kingdom, Judah.
Despite the demise of their
national political base in 586,
the Israelites alone,
really, among the many peoples
who have figured in Ancient Near
Eastern history--the Sumerians,
the Akkadians,
the Babylonians,
the Hittites,
the Phoenicians,
the Hurrians,
the Canaanites--they emerged
after the death of their state,
producing a community and a
culture that can be traced
through various twists and turns
and vicissitudes of history
right down into the modern
period.
That's a pretty unique claim.
And they carried with them the
idea and the traditions that
laid the foundation for the
major religions of the western
world: Judaism,
Christianity and Islam.
So what is this radical new
idea that shaped a culture and
enabled its survival into later
antiquity and really right into
the present day in some form?
 
Well, the conception of the
universe that was widespread
among ancient peoples is one
that you're probably familiar
with.
People regarded the various
natural forces as imbued with
divine power,
as in some sense divinities
themselves.
The earth was a divinity,
the sky was a divinity,
the water was a divinity,
had divine power.
In other words,
the gods were identical with or
imminent in the forces of
nature.
There were many gods.
 
No one single god was therefore
all powerful.
There is very,
very good evidence to suggest
that ancient Israelites by and
large shared this world view.
They participated at the very
earliest stages in the wider
religious and cultic culture of
the Ancient Near East.
However, over the course of
time, some ancient Israelites,
not all at once and not
unanimously,
broke with this view and
articulated a different view,
that there was one divine
power, one god.
But much more important than
number was the fact that this
god was outside of and above
nature.
This god was not identified
with nature.
He transcended nature,
and he wasn't known through
nature or natural phenomena.
 
He was known through history,
events and a particular
relationship with humankind.
 
And that idea,
which seems simple at first and
not so very revolutionary--we
will see,
that's an idea that affected
every aspect of Israelite
culture and in ways that will
become clear as we move through
the course and learn more about
biblical religion and biblical
views of history,
it was an idea that ensured the
survival of the ancient
Israelites as an entity,
as an ethnic religious entity.
 
In various complicated ways,
the view of an utterly
transcendent god with absolute
control over history made it
possible for some Israelites to
interpret even the most tragic
and catastrophic events,
such as the destruction of
their capital and the exile of
their remaining peoples,
not as a defeat of Israel's god
or even God's rejection of them,
but as necessary,
a necessary part of God's
larger purpose or plan for
Israel.
These Israelites left for us
the record of their religious
and cultural revolution in the
writings that are known as the
Hebrew Bible collectively,
and this course is an
introduction to the Hebrew Bible
as an expression of the
religious life and thought of
ancient Israel and as a
foundational document of western
civilization.
The course has several goals.
 
First and foremost,
we want to familiarize you with
the contents of the Hebrew
Bible.
We're not going to read every
bit of it word for word.
We will read certain chunks of
it quite carefully and from
others we will choose
selections,
but you will get a very good
sense and a good sampling of the
contents of the Bible.
 
A second goal is to introduce
you to a number of approaches to
the study of the Bible,
different methodological
approaches that have been
advanced by modern scholars but
some of which are in fact quite
old.
At times, we will play the
historian, at times we will be
literary critics.
 
"How does this work as
literature?"
At times we will be religious
and cultural critics.
"What is it the Israelites were
saying in their day and in their
time and against whom and for
what?"
A third goal of the course is
to provide some insight into the
history of interpretation.
 
This is a really fun part of
the course.
The Bible's radically new
conception of the divine,
its revolutionary depiction of
the human being as a moral
agent,
its riveting saga of the nation
of Israel, their story,
has drawn generations of
readers to ponder its meaning
and message.
And as a result,
the Bible has become the base
of an enormous edifice of
interpretation and commentary
and debate,
both in traditional settings
but also in academic,
university, secular settings.
And from time to time,
particularly in section
discussion, you will have
occasion to consider the ways in
which certain biblical passages
have been interpreted--sometimes
in very contradictory ways--over
the centuries.
That can be a really fun and
exciting part of the course.
A fourth goal of the course is
to familiarize you with the
culture of ancient Israel as
represented in the Bible against
the backdrop of its Ancient Near
Eastern setting,
its historical and cultural
setting, because the
archaeological discoveries that
were referred to in the Ancient
Near East,
reveal to us the spiritual and
cultural heritage of all of the
inhabitants of the region,
including the Israelites.
 
And one of the major
consequences of these finds is
the light that they have shed on
the background and the origin of
the materials in the Bible.
 
So we now see that the
traditions in the Bible did not
come out of a vacuum.
 
The early chapters of Genesis,
Genesis 1 through 11--they're
known as the "Primeval History,"
which is a very unfortunate
name, because these chapters
really are not best read or
understood as history in the
conventional sense--but these 11
chapters owe a great deal to
Ancient Near Eastern mythology.
The creation story in Genesis 1
draws upon the Babylonian epic
known as Enuma Elish.
 
We'll be talking about that
text in some depth.
The story of the first human
pair in the Garden of Eden,
which is in Genesis 2 and 3 has
clear affinities with the Epic
of Gilgamesh,
that's a Babylonian and
Assyrian epic in which a hero
embarks on this exhausting
search for immortality.
 
The story of Noah and the
flood, which occurs in Genesis 6
through 9 is simply an Israelite
version of an older flood story
that we have found copies of:
a Mesopotamian story called the
Epic of Atrahasis a flood story
that we also have incorporated
in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
 
Biblical traditions have roots
that stretch deep into earlier
times and out into surrounding
lands and traditions,
and the parallels between the
biblical stories and Ancient
Near Eastern stories that they
parallel has been the subject of
intense study.
However, it isn't just the
similarity between the biblical
materials and the Ancient Near
Eastern sources that is
important to us.
In fact, in some ways it's the
dissimilarity that is remarkably
important to us,
the biblical transformation of
a common Near Eastern heritage
in light of its radically new
conceptions of God and the world
and humankind.
We'll be dealing with this in
some depth, but I'll give you
one quick example.
 
We have a Sumerian story about
the third millennium BCE,
going back 3000--third
millennium, 3000 BCE.
It's the story of Ziusudra,
and it's very similar to the
Genesis flood story of Noah.
 
In both of these stories,
the Sumerian and the Israelite
story, you have a flood that is
the result of a deliberate
divine decision;
one individual is chosen to be
rescued;
that individual is given very
specific instructions on
building a boat;
he is given instructions about
who to bring on board;
the flood comes and
exterminates all living things;
the boat comes to rest on a
mountaintop;
the hero sends out birds to
reconnoiter the land;
when he comes out of the ark he
offers a sacrifice to the
god--the same narrative elements
are in these two stories.
It's just wonderful when you
read them side by side.
So what is of great
significance though is not
simply that the biblical writer
is retelling a story that
clearly went around everywhere
in ancient Mesopotamia;
they were transforming
the story so that it became a
vehicle for the expression of
their own values and their own
views.
In the Mesopotamian stories,
for example,
the gods act capriciously,
the gods act on a whim.
 
In fact, in one of the stories,
the gods say,
"Oh, people,
they're so noisy,
I can't sleep,
let's wipe them all out."
That's the rationale.
 
There's no moral scruple.
 
They destroy these helpless but
stoic humans who are chafing
under their tyrannical and
unjust and uncaring rule.
In the biblical story,
when the Israelites told the
story, they modified it.
 
It's God's uncompromising
ethical standards that lead him
to bring the flood in an act of
divine justice.
He's punishing the evil
corruption of human beings that
he has so lovingly created and
whose degradation he can't bear
to witness.
So it's saying something
different.
It's providing a very different
message.
So when we compare the Bible
with the literature of the
Ancient Near East,
we'll see not only the
incredible cultural and literary
heritage that was obviously
common to them,
but we'll see the ideological
gulf that separated them and
we'll see how biblical writers
so beautifully and cleverly
manipulated and used these
stories,
as I said, as a vehicle for the
expression of a radically new
idea.
They drew upon these sources
but they blended and shaped them
in a particular way.
And that brings us to a
critical problem facing anyone
who seeks to reconstruct ancient
Israelite religion or culture on
the basis of the biblical
materials.
That problem is the conflicting
perspective between the final
editors of the text and some of
the older sources that are
incorporated into the Bible,
some of the older sources that
they were obviously drawing on.
 
Those who were responsible for
the final editing,
the final forms of the texts,
had a decidedly monotheistic
perspective, ethical
monotheistic perspective,
and they attempted to impose
that perspective on their older
source materials;
and for the most part they were
successful.
But at times the result of
their effort is a deeply
conflicted, deeply ambiguous
text.
And again, that's going to be
one of the most fun things for
you as readers of this text,
if you're alert to it,
if you're ready to listen to
the cacophony of voices that are
within the text.
In many respects,
the Bible represents or
expresses a basic discontent
with the larger cultural milieu
in which it was produced,
and that's interesting for us,
because a lot of modern people
have a tendency to think of the
Bible as an emblem of
conservatism.
Right?
We tend to think of this as an
old fuddy-duddy document,
it's outdated,
has outdated ideas,
and I think the challenge of
this course is that you read the
Bible with fresh eyes so that
you can appreciate it for what
it was,
in many ways what it continues
to be: a revolutionary,
cultural critique.
 
We can read the Bible with
fresh and appreciative eyes only
if we first acknowledge and set
aside some of our
presuppositions about the Bible.
 
It's really impossible,
in fact, that you not have some
opinions about this work,
because it's an intimate part
of our culture.
So even if you've never opened
it or read it yourself,
I bet you can cite me a line or
two--"an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth," and I bet
you don't really know what it
means.
"The poor will always be with
you": I'm sure you don't really
know what that means.
 
These are things and phrases
that we hear and they create
within us a certain impression
of the biblical text and how it
functions.
Verses are quoted,
they're alluded to,
whether to be championed and
valorized or whether to be
lampooned and pilloried.
But we can feel that we have a
rough idea of the Bible and a
rough idea of its outlook when
in fact what we really have are
popular misconceptions that come
from the way in which the Bible
has been used or misused.
 
Most of our cherished
presuppositions about the Bible
are based on astonishing claims
that others have made on behalf
of the Bible,
claims that the Bible has not
made on behalf of itself.
 
So before we proceed,
I need to ask you to set aside
for the purposes of this course,
some of the more common myths
about the Bible.
I have a little list here for
you.
The first is the idea that the
Bible's a book.
It's not a book.
We'll get rid of that one.
 
The Bible is not a book with
all that that implies,
that it has a uniform style and
a message and a single author,
the sorts of things we think of
when we think in a conventional
sense of the word "book."
 
It's a library.
It's an anthology of writings
or books written and edited over
an extensive period of time by
people in very different
situations responding to very
different issues and stimuli,
some political,
some historical,
some philosophical,
some religious,
some moral.
There are many types or genres
of material in the Bible.
There's narrative,
wonderful narrative stories.
There's all kinds of law.
 
There are cultic and ritual
texts that prescribe how some
ceremony is supposed to be
performed.
There are records of the
messages of prophets.
There's lyric poetry,
there's love poetry,
there are proverbs,
there are psalms of
thanksgiving and lament.
 
So, there's a tremendous
variety of material in this
library, and it follows from the
fact that it's not a book but an
anthology of diverse works,
that it's not an ideological
monolith.
And this is something a lot of
students struggle with.
 
Each book, or strand of
tradition within a book,
within the biblical collection
sounds its own distinctive note
in the symphony of reflection
that is the Bible.
Genesis is concerned to account
for the origin of things and
wrestles with the existence of
evil,
the existence of idolatry and
suffering in a world that's
created by a good god.
 
The priestly texts in Leviticus
and Numbers emphasize the
sanctity of all life and the
ideal of holiness and ethical
and ritual purity.
 
There are odes to human reason
and learning and endeavor in the
wisdom book of Proverbs.
 
Ecclesiastes reads like an
existentialist writing from the
twentieth century.
 
It scoffs at the vanity of all
things, including wisdom,
and espouses a kind of positive
existentialism.
The Psalms are very individual
writings that focus on
individual piety and love and
worship of God.
Job, possibly the greatest book
of the Bible,
I won't give away my
preferences there,
challenges conventional
religious piety and arrives at
the bittersweet conclusion that
there is no justice in this
world or any other,
but that nonetheless we're not
excused from the thankless and
perhaps ultimately meaningless
task of righteous living.
 
One of the most wonderful and
fortuitous facts of history is
that later Jewish communities
chose to put all this stuff in
this collection we call the
Bible.
They chose to include all of
these dissonant voices together.
They didn't strive to reconcile
the conflicts,
nor should we.
They didn't, we shouldn't.
Each book, each writer,
each voice reflects another
thread in the rich tapestry of
human experience,
human response to life and its
puzzles, human reflection on the
sublime and the depraved.
 
And that leads me to my second
point, which is that biblical
narratives are not pious
parables about saints.
Okay?
Not pious tales.
They're psychologically real
literature about very real or
realistic people and life
situations.
They're not stories about pious
people whose actions are always
exemplary and whose lives should
be models for our own,
despite what Sunday School
curricula will often turn them
into.
And despite what they would
have us believe.
There is a genre of
literature that details the
lives of saints,
Hagiography,
but that came later and is
largely something we find in the
Christian era.
It's not found in the Bible.
 
The Bible abounds with human
not superhuman beings,
and their behavior can be
scandalous.
It can be violent,
it can be rebellious,
outrageous, lewd,
vicious.
But at the same time like real
people, they can turn around and
act in a way that is loyal and
true above and beyond the call
of duty.
They can change, they can grow.
But it's interesting to me that
there are many people who,
when they open the Bible for
the first time,
they close it in shock and
disgust.
Jacob is a deceiver;
Joseph is an arrogant,
spoiled brat;
Judah reneges on his
obligations to his
daughter-in-law and goes off and
sleeps with a prostitute.
 
Who are these people?
 
Why are they in the Bible?
 
And the shock comes from the
expectation that the heroes of
the Bible are somehow being held
up as perfect people.
That's just not a claim that's
made by the Bible itself.
So biblical characters are real
people with real,
compelling moral conflicts and
ambitions and desires,
and they can act shortsightedly
and selfishly.
But they can also,
like real people,
learn and grow and change;
and if we work too hard and too
quickly to vindicate biblical
characters just because they're
in the Bible,
then we miss all the good
stuff.
We miss all of the moral
sophistication,
the deep psychological insights
that have made these stories of
such timeless interest.
So read it like you would read
any good book with a really good
author who knows how to make
some really interesting
characters.
Thirdly, the Bible's not for
children.
I have a 12-year-old and an
8-year-old.
I won't let them read it.
I won't let them read it.
 
Those "Bible Stories for
Children" books,
they scare me.
They really scare me.
It's not suitable for children.
 
The subject matter in the Bible
is very adult,
particularly in the narrative
texts.
There are episodes of treachery
and incest and murder and rape.
And the Bible is not for naive
optimists.
It's hard-hitting stuff.
 
And it speaks to those who are
courageous enough to acknowledge
that life is rife with pain and
conflict, just as it's filled
with compassion and joy.
 
It's not for children in
another sense.
Like any literary masterpiece,
the Bible is characterized by a
sophistication of structure and
style and an artistry of theme
and metaphor,
and believe me,
that's lost on adult readers
quite often.
It makes its readers work.
 
The Bible doesn't moralize,
or rarely, rarely moralizes.
It explores moral issues and
situations, puts people in moral
issues and situations.
 
The conclusions have to be
drawn by the reader.
There are also all kinds of
paradoxes and subtle puns and
ironies, and in section where
you'll be doing a lot of your
close reading work,
those are some of the things
that will be drawn to your
attention.
You'll really begin to
appreciate them in time.
The fourth myth we want to get
rid of: the Bible is not a book
of theology, it's not a
catechism or a book of
systematic theology.
 
It's not a manual of religion,
despite the fact that at a much
later time, very complex systems
of theology are going to be spun
from particular interpretations
of biblical passages.
You know, there's nothing in
the Bible that really
corresponds to prevailing modern
western notions of religion,
what we call religion,
and indeed there's no word for
religion in the language of
biblical Hebrew.
There just isn't a word
"religion."
With the rise of Christianity,
western religion came to be
defined to a large degree by the
confession of,
or the intellectual assent to,
certain doctrinal points of
belief.
Religion became defined
primarily as a set of beliefs,
a catechism of beliefs or
truths that required your
assent,
what I think of as the
catechism kind of notion of
religion.
That's entirely alien to the
world of the Bible.
 
It's clear that in biblical
times and in the Ancient Near
East generally,
religion wasn't a set of
doctrines that you ascribed to.
 
To become an Israelite,
later on a Jew--the word "Jew"
isn't something we can really
historically use until about
this time,
so most of our period we're
going to be talking about the
ancient Israelites--to become an
Israelite,
you simply joined the Israelite
community, you lived an
Israelite life,
you died an Israelite death.
 
You obeyed Israelite law and
custom, you revered Israelite
lore, you entered into the
historical community of Israel
by accepting that their fate and
yours should be the same.
It was sort of a process of
naturalization,
what we think of today as
naturalization.
So the Hebrew Bible just isn't
a theological textbook.
It contains a lot of narratives
and its narrative materials are
an account of the odyssey of a
people,
the nation of Israel.
 
They're not an account of the
divine, which is what theology
means, an account of the divine.
 
However, having said this,
I should add that although the
Bible doesn't contain formal
statements of religious belief
or systematic theology,
it treats issues,
many moral issues and some
existential issues that are
central to the later discipline
of theology,
but it treats them very
differently.
Its treatment of these issues
is indirect, it's implicit.
It uses the language of story
and song and poetry and paradox
and metaphor.
It uses a language and a style
that's very far from the
language and style of later
philosophy and abstract
theology.
Finally, on our myth count,
I would point out--well I don't
really need to cross this out,
this is something to discuss--I
would point out that the Bible
was formulated and assembled and
edited and modified and censored
and transmitted first orally and
then in writing by human beings.
 
The Bible itself doesn't claim
to have been written by God.
That belief is a religious
doctrine of a much later age.
And even then one wonders how
literally it was meant--it's
interesting to go back and look
at some of the earliest claims
about the origin of the biblical
text.
Similarly, the so-called five
books of Moses--Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers,
Deuteronomy,
the first five books we call
the Pentateuch of Moses--nowhere
claim to have been written in
their entirety by Moses.
 
That's not something they say
themselves.
Some laws in Exodus,
you know, the Book of the
Covenant, a few things--yes,
it says Moses wrote those down,
but not the whole five books
that tradition later will
ascribe to him.
The Bible clearly had many
contributors over many
centuries, and the individual
styles and concerns of those
writers,
their political and religious
motivations, betray themselves
frequently.
I leave aside here the question
of divine inspiration,
which is an article of faith in
many biblical religions.
 
It's no doubt an article of
faith for people in this very
room.
But there is no basic
incompatibility between
believing on faith in the divine
inspiration of the Bible and
acknowledging the role that
human beings have played in the
actual formulation and editing
and transmission and
preservation of that same Bible.
And since this is a university
course and not perhaps a
theological course or within a
theological setting,
it's really only the latter,
the demonstrably human
component, that will concern us.
 
It's very easy for me to assert
that our interest in the Hebrew
Bible will be centered on the
culture and the history and the
literature and the religious
thought of ancient Israel in all
of its diversity rather than
questions of faith and theology.
But the fact remains that the
document is the basis for the
religious faith of many millions
of people, and some of them are
here now.
It is inevitable that you will
bring what you learn in this
course into dialogue with your
own personal religious beliefs,
and for some of you,
I hope all of you,
that will be enriching and
exciting.
For some of you it may be
difficult.
I know that,
and I want you to rest assured
that no one in this course
wishes to undermine or malign
religious faith any more than
they wish to promote or
proselytize for religious faith.
Religious faith simply isn't
the topic of this course.
The rich history and literature
and religious thought of ancient
Israel as preserved for us over
millennia in the pages of this
remarkable volume,
that is our topic,
and so our approach is going to
be necessarily academic;
and especially given the
diversity of people in this
room, that's really all that it
can be,
so that we have a common ground
and common goals for our
discussions.
But it has been my experience
that from time to time students
will raise a question or ask a
question that is prompted by a
commitment,
a prior commitment to an
article of faith.
Sometimes they're not even
aware that that's what they're
doing, and I want you to
understand that on those
occasions I'll most likely
respond by inviting you to
consider the article of faith
that lies behind that question
and is creating that particular
problem for you.
I'm not going to be drawn into
a philosophical or theological
debate over the merits of that
belief,
but I'll simply point out how
or why that belief might be
making it difficult for you to
read or accept what the text is
actually and not ideally saying,
and leave you to think about
that.
And I see those as wonderful
learning opportunities for the
class.
Those are in no way a problem
for me.
All right, so let's give a few
sort of necessary facts and
figures now about the Bible and
then I need to talk a little bit
about the organization of the
course.
So those are the last two
things we really need to do.
An overview of the structure of
the Bible.
So you have a couple of
handouts that should help you
here.
So, the Bible is this
assemblage of books and writings
dating from approximately 1000
BCE--we're going to hear very
diverse opinions about how far
back this stuff dates--down to
the second century:
the last book within the Hebrew
Bible was written in the 160s
BCE.
Some of these books which we
think are roughly from a certain
date, they will contain
narrative snippets or legal
materials or oral traditions
that may even date back or
stretch back further in time,
and they were perhaps
transmitted orally and then
ended up in these written forms.
 
The Bible is written largely in
Hebrew, hence the name Hebrew
Bible.
There are a few passages in
Aramaic.
So you have a handout that
breaks down the three major
components.
It's the one that's written two
columns per page.
Okay?
 
 
 
We're going to talk in a minute
about those three sections,
so you want to have that handy.
 
 
 
These writings have had a
profound and lasting impact on
three world religions:
Judaism, Christianity and
Islam.
For the Jewish communities who
first compiled these writings in
the pre-Christian era,
the Bible was perhaps first and
foremost a record of God's
eternal covenant with the Jewish
people.
So Jews refer to the Bible as
the Tanakh.
It's the term you see up here.
 
It should be also on that
sheet, Tanakh,
which is really the letter "t",
"n" and "kh",
and they've put little "a's" in
there to make it easy to
pronounce,
because kh is hard to
pronounce, so Tanach.
 
Okay?
And this is an acronym.
The T stands for Torah,
which is a word that means
instruction or teaching.
 
It's often translated "law";
I think that's a very poor
translation.
It means instruction,
way, teaching,
and that refers to the first
five books that you see listed
here, Genesis through
Deuteronomy.
The second division of the
Bible is referred to as
Nevi'im,
which is the Hebrew word for
"prophets."
The section of the Prophets is
divided really into two parts,
because there are two types of
writing in the prophetic section
of the Bible.
The first or former Prophets
continues the kind of narrative
prose account of the history of
Israel, focusing on the
activities of Israel's prophets.
All right?
So, the Former Prophets are
narrative texts.
The Latter Prophets are poetic
and oracular writings that bear
the name of the prophet to whom
the writings are ascribed.
 
You have the three major
prophets, Isaiah,
Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
and then the twelve minor
prophets,
which in the Hebrew Bible get
counted together as one book,
because those twelve are very
small.
The final section of the Bible
is referred to as Ketuvim
in Hebrew, which simply means
"Writings,"
and that's probably about 50%
of the Hebrew you're going to
get in the whole course,
so please don't be scared.
 
You know, I've got two or three
other terms that'll be useful
along the way,
but there's really no need to
know Hebrew.
I just want you to understand
why Tanakh is the word
that's used to refer to the
Bible.
So the Ketuvim,
or the Writings,
are really a miscellany.
They contain works of various
types, and the three parts
correspond very roughly to the
process of canonization or
authoritativeness for the
community.
The Torah probably reached a
fixed and authoritative status
first, then the books of the
Prophets and finally the
Writings.
And probably by the end of the
first century,
all of this was organized in
some way.
If you look at the other
handout, you'll see,
however, that any course on the
Bible is going to run
immediately into the problem of
defining the object of study,
because different Bibles served
different communities over the
centuries.
One of the earliest
translations of the Hebrew Bible
was a translation into Greek
known as the Septuagint.
It was written for the
benefit--it was translated for
the benefit of Jews who lived in
Alexandria--Greek-speaking Jews
who lived in Alexandria,
Egypt in the Hellenistic period
somewhere around the third or
second century BCE.
The translation has some
divergences with the traditional
Hebrew text of the Bible as we
now have it,
including the order of the
books, and some of these things
are charted for you on the chart
that I've handed out.
The Septuagint's rationale for
ordering the books is temporal.
They've clustered books Genesis
through Esther,
which tell of things past;
the books of Job through the
Song of Songs or the Song of
Solomon contain wisdom that
applies to the present;
and then the prophetic books,
Isaiah to Malachi,
contain or tell of things
future.
Some copies of the Septuagint
contain some books not included
in the Hebrew canon but accepted
in the early Christian canon.
 
The Septuagint,
the Greek translation,
became by and large the Bible
of Christianity,
or more precisely it became the
"Old Testament" of the Hebrew
Bible.
The church adopted the Hebrew
Bible as a precursor to its
largely Hellenistic gospels.
It was an important association
for it, with an old and
respected tradition.
 
Our primary concern is the
Bible of the ancient Israelite
and Jewish community--the 24
books grouped in the Torah,
Prophets and Writings on that
other sheet--which is common to
all Bibles.
Whether Jewish or Christian,
those 24 are the baseline
common books.
So those are the 24 that we're
going to focus on.
Because the term "Old
Testament" is a theologically
loaded term, it sort of suggests
the doctrine that the New
Testament has somehow fulfilled
or surpassed or antiquated the
Bible of ancient Israel,
you're going to hear me refer
to the object of our study as
the Hebrew Bible.
You may certainly use any other
term, and you may certainly use
the term Old Testament,
as long as it's clear we're
talking about this set of 24
books and not some of the other
things that are in the Old
Testament that aren't in the
traditional Hebrew Bible.
 
It means you're studying less,
so that might be a good thing.
So, it's fine with me if you
want to use that but I will
prefer the more accurate term
"Hebrew Bible."
Also while we're on
terminology, you'll notice that
I use BCE to refer to the period
before 0 and CE to refer to the
period after 0;
the Common Era and Before the
Common Era, and in a lot of your
secondary readings and writings
they'll be using the same thing.
 
It corresponds to what you know
as BC, Before Christ,
and Anno Domini,
AD, the year of our Lord.
It's just a
non-Christian-centric way of
dating and in a lot of your
secondary readings you'll see
it,
so you should get used to it:
BCE and CE, Before the Common
Era and the Common Era.
From earliest times,
Christians made use of the
Bible but almost always in its
Greek translation,
and the Christian Old Testament
contains some material not in
the Hebrew Bible,
as I've mentioned.
And some of these works are
referred to as the Apocrypha--so
you will have heard that term.
 
These are writings that were
composed somewhere around here,
sort of 200 BCE to 100 CE.
 
They were widely used by Jews
of the period.
They simply weren't considered
to be of the same status as the
24 books.
I'm glad they pick up the
garbage at 11:10 [laughs]
on Wednesday mornings.
But they did become part of the
canon of Catholic Christianity
and in the sixteenth century,
their canonical status was
confirmed for the Catholic
Church.
With the Renaissance and the
Reformation, some Christians
became interested in Hebrew
versions of the Bible.
They wanted to look at the
Hebrew and not the Greek
translation from the Hebrew.
 
Protestants,
the Protestant church,
denied canonical status to the
books of the Apocrypha.
They said they were important
for pious instruction but
excluded them from their canon.
 
There are also some works you
may know of, referred to as the
Pseudepigrapha--we'll talk about
some of these things in a little
more detail later--from roughly
the same period;
tend to be a little more
apocalyptic in nature,
and they were never part of the
Jewish or the Catholic canon,
but there are some eastern
Christian groups that have
accepted them in their canon.
 
The point I'm trying to make is
that there are very many sacred
canons out there that are
cherished by very many religious
communities,
and they're all designated
"Bibles."
So again, we're focusing on
that core set of 24 books that
are common to all Bibles
everywhere,
the 24 books of what would in
fact be the Jewish
Tanakh.
Not only has there been variety
regarding the scope of the
biblical canon in different
communities,
but there's been some fluidity
in the actual text itself.
We don't, of course,
have any original copies of
these materials as they came off
the pen of whoever it was who
was writing them,
and in fact before the middle
of the twentieth century,
our oldest manuscripts and
fragments of manuscripts of the
Bible dated to the year 900.
That's an awful long distance
from the events they're talking
about.
And we've got to think about
that, right?
You've got to think about that
and what it means and how were
they transmitted and preserved
without the means of technology,
obviously, that we have today;
and what was so exciting in the
middle of the twentieth century
was the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
I'm sure that you've heard of
them.
They brought about a dramatic
change in the state of our
knowledge of our Hebrew
manuscript evidence.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were found
in caves in the Judean desert.
We used to think they were a
library of a sectarian
community;
now I think they think it was a
pottery factory or something.
 
So maybe they were just shoved
there by people fleeing the
Roman conquest in 70.
 
So that's up for grabs.
 
But we have this really great
collection of scrolls,
and among them we have found an
almost complete copy of every
book of the Bible.
 
Sorry--almost complete copy of
the Book of Isaiah and then
partial copies or fragments of
all of the biblical books,
except maybe Esther.
 
Am I wrong about that?
 
I don't think there's an Esther
from Qumran, I think that's the
only one.
And some of them date back to
the fourth and third century.
 
So do you understand now why
everybody was so excited?
Suddenly, we have evidence,
thirteen or fourteen hundred
years earlier,
that people were reading this
stuff and,
by and large,
it's a pretty constant textual
tradition.
Sure there are differences,
sure there are differences.
We see that our manuscripts are
not exactly like those
fragments, but there is a
remarkable degree,
a high degree of correspondence
so that we really can speak of a
relatively stable textual
tradition but still some
fluidity.
And that's going to be
interesting for us to think
about.
There are many translations of
the Bible, but I would like you
to purchase for this course the
Jewish Study Bible .
So let me turn now to just some
of the administrative,
organizational details of the
course, the secondary readings
that we'll be using.
 
 
 
I'm asking you to pick up the
Jewish Study Bible not
only for the translation of the
Tanakh,
which is a very good
translation, but because it
contains wonderful scholarly
articles in the back.
It used to be we had a course
packet for this course that was
two volumes, and now with the
purchase of this,
I've been able to really
consolidate the readings.
They're really wonderful;
great introductions to the
individual books of the Bible
and so I think you will find
that this will become like a
Bible to you [laughs].
So you need to pick that up.
 
It's at the Yale bookstore.
 
I also would like you to pick
up this paperback,
it's not terribly expensive.
 
We're going to be using it in
the first few weeks especially:
The Ancient Near East.
 
Other readings,
the secondary readings for the
course, are all already online.
 
I will be also making them
available at Allegra for people
who would like to just purchase
them already printed out so you
don't do it yourself,
but I know some people really
prefer to work online--and
certainly for the first week of
reading,
you can get started because it
is online.
I don't think things will be
available at Allegra's until
probably tomorrow afternoon.
The syllabus.
As you can see,
it's a pretty thick syllabus,
but it's divided into a
schedule of lectures and then a
schedule of readings.
All right?
So, understand that there are
two distinct things there.
 
It's not just all the scheduled
lectures.
The last few pages are a
schedule of the actual readings,
and the assignment that you'll
have for the weekend and for
next week's lectures are the
readings by Kaufman.
I really, really need you to
read that before the next class,
and I want you to read it
critically.
Kaufman's ideas are important,
but they are also overstated,
and so they're going to be
interesting for us.
We're going to wrestle with his
claims quite a bit during the
course of the semester.
 
The secondary readings are
heavier at the beginning of the
course when we are reading very
small segments of biblical text.
That will shift. Right?
 
Towards the end of the course
you're going to be reading,
you know, a couple of books in
the Bible and maybe a ten-page
article of secondary reading;
so, you know,
it's front loaded with
secondary readings.
So you'll want to get started
on the Kaufman,
because for the first few weeks
it's quite a bit of secondary
reading but we're covering just
a few chapters of Bible each
time in the first few weeks.
 
Sections: We're going to be
doing this online registration
thing that I've never done
before, so I hope it works.
We do have three teaching
fellows for this course.
I hope that will be sufficient.
 
Actually, if the teaching
fellows could stand up so people
could at least recognize you,
that would be wonderful.
Anyone wants to volunteer,
we could have a fourth.
Okay, so we have two in the
back there, we have Tudor Sala
raising his hand and Tzvi Novick
here.
They will be running regular
discussion sections and then
Kristine Garroway will be
running a writing requirement
section.
I don't think that was listed
in the Blue Book,
but it should've been listed
online that it is possible to
fulfill your writing skills
requirement through this course.
 
So Kristine will be running
that.
We will bring on Monday--so
please have your schedules as
well-formed as they are,
on Monday--we will put up times
and we will take a straw poll to
figure out if we can accommodate
everybody within the times.
 
One more extremely important
announcement,
it's on your syllabus,
but I want to underline it even
more than it is already
underlined and boldfaced.
I want to underline the
importance of the section
discussions in this course.
 
In fact, it's really wrong to
call them section discussions.
It sounds like you're
discussing the lectures and the
readings and you're really not.
 
The section discussions are a
complement to the lectures.
What I mean is:
this is an awfully big thing to
spend just one semester
studying,
and I can't do it all,
and in my lectures I'll be
trying to set broad themes and
patterns and describe what's
going on,
but I want you to have the
experience of actually sitting
and reading chunks of text and
struggling with that and
understanding the history of
interpretation of passages and
how so many important things
have happened historically
because of people's efforts to
understand this text.
 
So in sections,
a large part of the focus in
section will be on specific
passages,
reading and struggling with the
text, the kind of thing I can't
do in lecture.
This is important because your
final paper assignment will be
an exercise in exegesis,
an interpretation.
 
The skills that you will need
for that paper I am fairly
certain are not things that you
would've acquired in high school
and,
if we have some
upperclassmen--I don't know,
but maybe not even some
upperclassmen will have acquired
here yet.
Exegesis is a very particular
kind of skill and the teaching
fellows will be introducing you
to methods of exegesis.
So it's really a training
ground for the final paper,
and we have found that people
don't succeed in the course in
the final paper without the
training they get in section
discussion,
which is why section
participation is worth ten
percent of your grade.
However, if there are repeated,
unexcused absences,
there will be an adjustment in
the grade calculation,
and it will be worth twenty to
twenty-five percent of your
grade, and it will be a negative
grade also.
And believe me,
this is a favor to you.
It is definitely a favor to you.
 
These sections are critically
important in this course.
Okay?
So, if you have any questions,
I can hang around for a few
minutes, but thank you for
coming.
We'll see you Monday.
