A course on trends in Jewish religious, cultural, and social life. Our understanding of the Hebrew Bible has been transformed in recent years due to insights from literary criticism, anthropology, archaeology, and historiography. This course explores the impact of these innovations and provides a multilayered introduction to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, focused on the mingling of memory, religion, and the literary imagination.

The ways that people understand the Bible are deeply linked with their ways of understanding and living in the world. We will explore the changes in biblical interpretation over the last two thousand years as a key to the shifting horizons of Western culture, politics, literature, and religion. Topics will range widely, from the birth of the Bible to ancient heresies to modern philosophy, science, and literature. This will be a genealogy of Western thought as it wrestles with its canonical text.

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