English 381 2W3
Fall 2005
Literature of the Bible Prof. David Richter
Syllabus
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.
Effectively we will be reading the Bible more or less sequentially in
September and October, and exploring critical approaches to biblical texts in
November and December. We will not be reading
through the entire Bible but will cover substantial portions of the following
books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jonah, Ruth,
Job, Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Luke, Revelation.
Required Texts:
The
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.
The rest of the required readings will be criticism, mainly by widely
known scholars, but some of it by myself, which will
be made available on BlackBoard, a private website
available only to students in this course.
Copies of the book chapters and critical articles will be available on
that site, which you will be able to access from computers in the library and
in computer labs on campus, and also from home. Full copies of the most important texts will
be on reserve (I hope) in Rosenthal.
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
For recommended websites, see the BlackBoard
site.
Written
Work:
Several short papers on biblical themes and texts, on such issues as translation-as-interpretation,
reduplications
and reinterpretations of biblical narratives, plus a term
paper on the Bible as a literary text or as a text underlying Western
literary texts. Hopefully
no final examination.
Tentative
Schedule
August 31: The Richter was unavoidably absent. <If I can arrange a make-up day, I won’t
have to extend class to the 21 December.
That depends on my schedule and yours.>
September 6: Introduction to the Course.
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.
7. Biblical texts as composites, collectively written and edited from disparate
documents.
September 13: Genesis.
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
Biblical
Look
over also some of the selections from James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near
Eastern Texts.
September 20: Out of
Biblical
Reading: Exodus 1-20, 32-34, Numbers 11-14, 16, 20-25, 31; Deuteronomy 1-4, 28,
31, 34; Joshua 1-12
September 27: Judges, Samuel, Saul, David
Biblical
Critical
October
5: QC Closed, no classes.
October
12: QC Closed, no classes
October 19: The Davidic Monarchy -- Rise, Decline, Fall
Biblical
Critical
Texts: None
October 26: Shorter Biblical Narratives
Biblical
Texts: Ruth, Jonah, Job (abridged), Esther
November 2: The Gospels
Biblical
Texts: Mark, Matthew, Luke. (John recommended)
Critical
November 9: The Apocalyptic Narratives
Biblical
Texts: Daniel, Revelation
November 16:
Formalist Criticism: Narrative as Thematic Form
Critical
Return
to Genesis and Samuel
November 23: Archetypal and Authorial Criticism:
Critical
Biblical
Texts: All over the map.
November 30: Structuralist-Semiotic
Criticism
Critical
Biblical
Texts: Genesis
December 7: Phenomenological Reader-Oriented Criticism
Critical
Biblical
Text: Genesis, 2 Samuel;
December 14: The Bible Meets Gender and Queer Theory
Critical
Texts: Chapters from the following books: Phyllis Trible:
Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Mieke Bal: Lethal Loves:
Feminist Literary
Texts:
selections from 2 Samuel, Judges, Mark, Talmud Bavli,
Bava Metzia.
December 21:
The Bible's Interpretive Communities: The World of Midrash
Critical