Hebrew Bible

This course provides students with more detailed insights and a working knowledge of the Old Testament, its texts, its development and its formation into a canon. Through lectures and workshop programmes, students are introduced to key features of the Old Testament, critical issues surrounding the development of this text, and modern ways of interpreting it given that world-views from ancient times are very different from those of the modern West.

Students will learn the conventions of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek transliteration. This enables them to read the scholarly literature more effectively. Awareness of the major differences between the Hebrew canon and the Greek canon of the Old Testament will be presented.

Exegetical skills will be taught combined with critical tools including textual criticism, literary criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and historical criticism specifically applied to Old Testament pericopes. Characterisation, point of view, theme, plot, poetic expression and metaphor are the heart of any literary understanding of texts. New literary critical approaches have opened up many fresh hermeneutical windows such as the world of the author, the world of the text and the world of the reader. Such concepts as real author, implied author, real reader, implied reader and narrator are part of this literary expression. The Old Testament is important for Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. In the Quran and other Muslim literature Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Moses, David, Solomon, Job all Old Testament characters are delineated. A significant understanding for biblical scholars is that reading the New Testament with any sense of depth can only come when there is an adequate knowledge of the Old. This course prepares the student for more detailed and scholarly Old Testament study (eg. in year 3).

The basic reference text will be the New Revised Standard Version.