English 381 AM3WA Spring 2006

The Bible as/in Literature 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.

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 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. Again, not exactly required. 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.

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 in Rosenthal.

Frye's The Great Code, Alter's Art of Biblical Narrative, etc, are available in paperback, well distributed, and reasonably cheap to own, but I have not ordered them. In addition, you may want to look at various ancillary texts, including 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, typescenes among the 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

January 30: 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.

February 1: The Documentary Hypothesis

Biblical Reading: Genesis.

In particular, attempt to analyze what is going on in the two creation narratives, the two flood narratives, and the two versions of the “selling of Joseph” story.

Critical Reading: Selections from Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1879): Chapter VIII: “The Narrative of the Hexateuch.” (Bb)

February 6: Genesis—The Archaic Narratives and the Abraham Saga

Biblical Reading: Genesis 1-22

Critical Reading: Erich Auerbach: "Odysseus's Scar" from Mimesis. (Bb) The Auerbach passage starts in the PDF file at page 708—ignore the beginning of that file. The passage from Homer can be read here in Samuel Butler’s translation.

February 8: The Jacob Saga

Biblical Reading: Genesis 22-37

Critical Reading: Roland Barthes: The Struggle with the Angel (Bb)

February 13: College Closed

February 15: The Joseph Story

Biblical Reading: Genesis 37-50

Critical Reading: Robert Alter, Chapter 1, The Art of Biblical Narrative TBA

February 20: College Closed

February 21: Classes follow Monday Schedule

Out of Egypt to the Promised Land:

Biblical Reading: Exodus 1-20; 32-34

February 22: In the Wilderness

Biblical Reading: Numbers 11-14, 16, 20-25, 31; Deuteronomy 1-4, 28, 31, 34.

Critical Reading: Mattitiahu Tzevat, "Israelite History and the Historical Books of the Old Testament."

February 27: Promised Land

Biblical Reading: Joshua 1-12, Judges 1-7.

March 1: Deborah and Gideon

Critical Reading: Sternberg: from The Poetics of Biblical Narrative

March 6: Abimelech and Jephthah

Critical Reading: Alter, The Character of Biblical Literature

March 8: Samson, Micah, The Concubine of Gibeah

Biblical Reading: Judges 13-21

Critical Reading: Mieke Bal, from Lethal Loves

March 13:

Biblical Reading: 1 Samuel

Samuel, Saul and David

March 15: 2 Samuel – 1 Kings 4

David as King

March 20: The Israelite Monarchy from Solomon to the Babylonian Captivity

Biblical Reading 1-2 Kings

March 22: Circling Back for Textual Issues

Biblical Reading: Genesis 11

Critical Reading: Fokkelman on The Tower of Babel

March 27: The Gospel According to Mark

Biblical Reading: Mark

Critical Reading: Akenson: The Gospels and the Historical Yeshua

March 29: The Gospel According to Matthew and Luke

Critical Reading: Helms: Who Wrote the Gospels

April 3: The Apocalyptic Narratives

Biblical Texts: Daniel, Revelation

April 5: Shorter Biblical Narratives

Biblical Texts: Ruth and Esther

April 10: Shorter Biblical Narratives:

Jonah and Job

April 12-23 Spring Break

April 24: The Bible Meets Feminism and Queer Theory

Readings: TBA

April 26: The Bible Meets Feminism and Queer Theory continued

May 1: The Bible’s Interpretive Communities:

Critical Reading: James Kugel, “The Assembly of Ladies” from In Potiphar’s House

May 3: The Bible’s Interpretive Communities:

Critical Reading: Emmanuel Levinas: “And God Created Woman” from Nine Talmudic Readings

May 8: Archetypal Criticism:

Critical Reading: selections from Northrop Frye: The Great Code (Bb);

May 10: Authorial Criticism:

Critical Reading: Harold Bloom: The Book of J

Biblical Texts: All over the map.

May 15: Conclusions and further questions

May 17: Conclusions and further questions continued

Last Day of Class