One of the foundations on which Western culture has been built, the narratives of the Bible are strange mixtures of myth, legend and history, both richly compelling and tremendously difficult to interpret. They were composed over many hundreds of years, written, rewritten and redacted to reflect the shifting historical situations of their storytellers and editors, situations we can reconstruct with the aid of the narratives themselves. Meanwhile, as the heirs, like it or not, of Western culture, we ourselves are formed by the biblical narratives that have been recast by the likes of Chaucer and Milton, Melville and Morrison.

This course will introduce the student to the Bible and to some of the ways used to study it today. After reviewing the main narrative sequence from Genesis through 2 Kings, the gospels and the apocalypses, we will start our analysis with the so-called "higher criticism," the historical and text-critical analysis of biblical narratives. We will explore the problem of translation, the distortions that occur when rewriting a Hebrew or Greek text in contemporary English. Then we will push on to explore the powers and limitations of contemporary modes of biblical interpretation, including (among others) the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, the formalist insights of Robert Alter, the narratological approaches of Meir Sternberg, and the feminist critiques of Mieke Bal. Note: After the first weeks, we will not be reading the bible sequentially but we will cover substantial portions of the following books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Job, Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Luke, Revelation.

The Oxford Study Bible. Revised English Bible with Apocrypha. (Oxford UP)

Well, not exactly required. Please buy this or any other Bible you fancy. This one happens to have at least minimal annotations and some interesting essays, though you may find as I do that the editors irritatingly tiptoe around some of the issues that would be controversial in fundamentalist territories.

Norman Gottwald: The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. A great reference text for doing bible-as-literature, in explicating the very complicated relationships between the historical moments described in books of the bible and the periods in which those books were actually written. Gives a strong sense of the bible as a social text, as reflecting in narrative art the changes over more than a millenium of the economic, political and religious life of the people who produced it.

Course-Pack. The rest of the required readings will be reproduced as a course-pack. That is, I will xerox copies of the book chapters and critical articles we will all be reading and sell the pack to you at cost. Full copies of the most important texts will be on reserve (I hope) in Rosenthal. Some of the books on reserve, including Frye's The Great Code, Alter's Art of Biblical Narrative, are available in paperback, well distributed, and reasonably cheap to own, but I have not ordered them. In addition, I shall be placing various ancillary texts on reserve: the Anchor series of translations with commentary; a Hebrew/English interlinear translation; Bernhard Anderson's textbook on the Bible as literature; an edition of the parallel Near-Eastern texts from the archaic period; plus materials plus works of contemporary criticism we probably won't have time to go over in class.

One final source you may want to acquire is the Online Bible. This consists of a display program with a series of modules many of which are FREE for the downloading. It can be somewhat tricky to set up but once it is done, you can set your screen so that it simultaneously displays different translations and versions of the Bible (or, if you have the languages, the original Hebrew or Greek, or Jerome's Latin Vulgate). Or you can look at the three synoptic gospels in three parallel columns on your screen, to see their similarities and differences. Or you can look at a translation of the Septuagint, which sometimes differs from the accepted Hebrew text. Or it can be used as a concordance program that will allow you to search for different usages of words, or to check if a particular phrase occurs elsewhere. The uses are many and the URLs where you can download this program are http://www.online-bible.com and www.answersingenesis.org

Elementary questions. 1. What is the bible? 2. Differences between the Hebrew and Christian bibles. The issue of the canon. 3. Problems of transmission. 4. Problems of translation. 5. Problems of historical dating and the relationship between the text and the events purportedly narrated. 6. Differences between the Bible and other ancient literatures on account of the cultural uses that have been made of scripture.

Since there is no prerequisite of a previous bible-as-lit course, we need to begin the course proper with a fast-and-dirty overview of the main narrative sequence (Genesis through Kings, plus the Gospels and the most important apocalyptic narratives) to establish the structural relations of these narratives. We are not going to be doing close reading at this stage: that is what the rest of the course will be about. The point is to get a sense of the sweep and the structure of the history as a whole and of individual books as making up major elements in that whole.

Critical Reading: None but please read appropriate chapters in Gottwald for this and the next two sessions.

Biblical Reading: Genesis.

Look over also some of the selections in your coursepak from James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts.

Biblical Reading: Exodus 1-20, 32-34, Numbers 11-14, 16, 20-25, 31; Deuteronomy 1-4, 28, 31, 34; Joshua 1-12

Biblical Reading: Judges, 1 Samuel

Critical Reading: Selections from Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1879). Mattitiahu Tzevat, "Israelite History and the Historical Books of the Old Testament."

Biblical Reading: 2 Samuel through 2 Kings

Biblical Texts: Ruth, Jonah, Job (abridged)

Some intertestamentary works:

Biblical Texts: Mark, Matthew, Luke. (John recommended)

A little history:

Biblical Texts: Daniel, Revelation

Some intertestamentary works:

Critical Reading: Erich Auerbach: "Odysseus's Scar" from Mimesis. Robert Alter: Introduction to The Art of Biblical Narrative,

Return to Genesis and Samuel

Critical Reading: selections from Northrop Frye: The Great Code.

Biblical Text: All over the map.

Critical Reading: Meir Sternberg: The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, chapter 6.

Biblical Text: Genesis, 2 Samuel;

Critical Reading: Selection from J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis. Roland Barthes: "The Struggle with the Angel: Textual Analysis of Genesis 32"

Biblical Texts: Genesis

Critical Texts: Chapters from the following books: Phyllis Trible: Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Mieke Bal: Lethal Loves: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Selections from Talmud -- Bava Metzia.

Biblical Texts: selections from 2 Samuel and Judges

Critical Readings: James Kugel: "The Assembly of Ladies" from In Potiphar's House; Emmanuel Levinas: "And God Created Woman" from Nine Talmudic Readings; David Richter, "Midrash and Mashal in the Blessing of Esau" from Narrative. Biblical and Midrashic Texts: Genesis; Selections from Genesis Rabba

The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia UP, 1976.

Charles, Robert H., ed. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.