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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 [BCE] 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 [BCE] 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 [BCE] 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 [BCE], 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 [above]
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 [and] 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, [and] 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.
Chapter 2. Common Myths about the Bible [00:16:10]
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 ***.
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
*** and *** and ***. And the Bible is not for naïve 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 [ca. 500 BCE], 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.
Chapter 3. An Overview of the Structure of the Bible [00:29:33]
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 [sounds] "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 asKetuvim 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 [correction: Professor Hayes meant to say Christian Bible
instead of Hebrew Bible here]. 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 [some of] 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. [beeping noise] 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; [they] 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 [see note 1].
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. [This is correct. No book of Esther has been found
among the Dead Sea Scrolls.] And some of them date back to the fourth and third century
[BCE]. 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.
Chapter 4. Course Organization [00:40:17]
There are many translations of the Bible, but I would like you to purchase for this
course the Jewish Study Bible [see References]. 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 [see References]. Other readings, the secondary readings for the course,
are all already online [for on-campus students]. I will be also making them available at Allegra
[bookstore] 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 [Yale
College Programs of Study], 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.