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 Bible has been invoked into many conversations about gender and sexuality, resulting in an oftentimes toxic view of these topics. But what does the Bible really say? We will not be surprised to find out that the Bible is no queer or feminist manifesto, but it does contain a complex, historically-situated, and culturally contextual view of gender and sexuality as its authors discuss family, power, God’s gender, sex work, same-sex contact, sexual violence, etc. In this course, we will attempt to set aside our assumptions of the Bible and instead meet its texts, authors, and characters on their own terms, all the while building skills in understanding and using theories of gender and sexuality. We will be able to critically engage biblical literature with a new set of questions by considering three distinct, yet interrelated, angles: *The Bible as literature *The Bible in its cultural context *Theories of gender and sexuality From an interweaving of these three perspectives, we will learn how to read the Bible, understand it historically, and then ask what understandings of gender and sexuality are reflected in its pages.

Repeat Rules