About This Course
Encounter the narrative books from literary, historical, and archaeological perspectives. Address real questions of what in the Bible is historical and what is not. See the world of the ancient Near East that produced it. See the Bible’s conception of God, covenant, and how to relate to one’s fellow human beings.
This is a full credit course. If you take all three courses in the series (The Hebrew Bible I-III) you will receive 3 credits. You do not have to take all the courses in the series if you do not want to.
The backbone of this course is a series of lectures on Coursecraft by Richard Elliott Friedman.
Friedman earned his doctorate at Harvard in Hebrew Bible. He was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge and Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Haifa. He participated in the City of David Project archaeological excavations of biblical Jerusalem. He is now the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and is the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego.
His books have been translated into Hebrew, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Korean, and French. He has been interviewed by CNN’s Larry King and on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Talk of the Nation.” He was a consultant for the Dreamworks film “The Prince of Egypt”; for Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers; for NBC “The Eternal Light”; for A&E “Mysteries of the Bible,” and “Who Wrote the Bible?”; and for PBS “Nova.”
Materials for this course will be:
Who Wrote the Bible? by Professor Richard Elliott Friedman
The Hebrew Bible on Coursecraft
Recommended but not required:
Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (can be accessed online free or you can buy it)
The Bible with Sources Revealed (note that some variations on this can be found online for free)
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will have a deeper understanding of the Hebrew Bible from the documentary hypothesis, and begin the process of integrating source-critical understandings of the Bible into their spiritual lives.
Students will receive credit for this course by taking quizzes and submitting for review a final dvar torah that integrates source-critical learning into a spiritual message.
The dvar is not uploaded to the website. Please post it once you have completed all quizzes in this course.
