tell you that human civilization is very, very old.

Nevertheless, our knowledge of the earliest

stages of human civilization was quite limited for many

centuries. That is, until the great

archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, which unearthed for us the

great civilizations of the Ancient Near East,

of which I have drawn a remarkably life-like map here on

the board: [laughter] Mediterranean,

I always start with the Mediterranean Ocean,

the Nile River, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

So: the great civilizations of ancient Egypt,

Mesopotamia and the area we refer to as the Fertile

Crescent, of which a little part here

about the size of Rhode Island is Canaan.

And archaeologists in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries were stunned to find the ruins and the records of

remarkable peoples and cultures--massive,

complex empires in some cases but some of which had completely

disappeared from human memory.

Their newly uncovered languages had been long forgotten;

their rich literary and legal texts were now indecipherable.

That soon changed.

But because of those discoveries, we are now in a

position to appreciate the monumental achievements of these

early civilizations, these earliest

civilizations. And so many scholars,

and many people, have remarked that it's not a

small irony that the Ancient Near Eastern people with one of

the, or perhaps the most

lasting legacy, was not a people that built and

inhabited one of the great centers of Ancient Near Eastern

civilization. It can be argued that the

Ancient Near Eastern people with the most lasting legacy is a

people that had an idea.

It was a new idea that broke with the ideas of its neighbors,

and those people were the Israelites.

And scholars have come to the realization that despite the

Bible's pretensions to the contrary,

the Israelites were a small, and I've actually

overrepresented it here, I'm sure it should be much

smaller, a small and relatively

insignificant group for much of their history.

They did manage to establish a kingdom in the land that was

known in antiquity as Canaan around the year 1000.

They probably succeeded in subduing some of their

neighbors, collecting tribute--there's some

controversy about that--but in about 922 this kingdom divided

into two smaller and lesser kingdoms that fell in

importance. The northern kingdom,

which consisted of ten of the twelve Israelite tribes,

and known confusingly as Israel, was destroyed in 722 by

the Assyrians. The southern kingdom,

which consisted of two of the twelve tribes and known as

Judah, managed to survive until the

year 586 when the Babylonians came in and conquered and sent

the people into exile.

The capital, Jerusalem, fell.

Conquest and exile were events that normally would spell the

end of a particular ethnic national group,

particularly in antiquity.

Conquered peoples would trade their defeated god for the

victorious god of their conquerors and eventually there

would be a cultural and religious assimilation,

intermarriage.

That people would disappear as a distinctive entity,

and in effect, that is what happened to the

ten tribes of the northern kingdom to a large degree.

They were lost to history.

This did not happen to those members of the nation of Israel

who lived in the southern kingdom, Judah.

Despite the demise of their national political base in 586,

the Israelites alone, really, among the many peoples

who have figured in Ancient Near Eastern history--the Sumerians,

the Akkadians, the Babylonians,

the Hittites, the Phoenicians,

the Hurrians, the Canaanites--they emerged

after the death of their state, producing a community and a

culture that can be traced through various twists and turns

and vicissitudes of history right down into the modern

period. That's a pretty unique claim.

And they carried with them the idea and the traditions that

laid the foundation for the major religions of the western

world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

So what is this radical new idea that shaped a culture and

enabled its survival into later antiquity and really right into

the present day in some form?

Well, the conception of the universe that was widespread

among ancient peoples is one that you're probably familiar

with. People regarded the various

natural forces as imbued with divine power,

as in some sense divinities themselves.

The earth was a divinity, the sky was a divinity,

the water was a divinity, had divine power.

In other words, the gods were identical with or

imminent in the forces of nature.

There were many gods.

No one single god was therefore all powerful.

There is very, very good evidence to suggest

that ancient Israelites by and large shared this world view.

They participated at the very earliest stages in the wider

religious and cultic culture of the Ancient Near East.

However, over the course of time, some ancient Israelites,

not all at once and not unanimously,

broke with this view and articulated a different view,

that there was one divine power, one god.

But much more important than number was the fact that this

god was outside of and above nature.

This god was not identified with nature.

He transcended nature, and he wasn't known through

nature or natural phenomena.

He was known through history, events and a particular

relationship with humankind.

And that idea, which seems simple at first and

not so very revolutionary--we will see,

that's an idea that affected every aspect of Israelite

culture and in ways that will become clear as we move through

the course and learn more about biblical religion and biblical

views of history, it was an idea that ensured the

survival of the ancient Israelites as an entity,

as an ethnic religious entity.

In various complicated ways, the view of an utterly

transcendent god with absolute control over history made it

possible for some Israelites to interpret even the most tragic

and catastrophic events, such as the destruction of

their capital and the exile of their remaining peoples,

not as a defeat of Israel's god or even God's rejection of them,

but as necessary, a necessary part of God's

larger purpose or plan for Israel.

These Israelites left for us the record of their religious

and cultural revolution in the writings that are known as the

Hebrew Bible collectively, and this course is an

introduction to the Hebrew Bible as an expression of the

religious life and thought of ancient Israel and as a

foundational document of western civilization.

The course has several goals.

First and foremost, we want to familiarize you with

the contents of the Hebrew Bible.

We're not going to read every bit of it word for word.

We will read certain chunks of it quite carefully and from

others we will choose selections,

but you will get a very good sense and a good sampling of the

contents of the Bible.

A second goal is to introduce you to a number of approaches to

the study of the Bible, different methodological

approaches that have been advanced by modern scholars but

some of which are in fact quite old.

At times, we will play the historian, at times we will be

literary critics.

"How does this work as literature?"

At times we will be religious and cultural critics.

"What is it the Israelites were saying in their day and in their

time and against whom and for what?"

A third goal of the course is to provide some insight into the

history of interpretation.

This is a really fun part of the course.

The Bible's radically new conception of the divine,

its revolutionary depiction of the human being as a moral

agent, its riveting saga of the nation

of Israel, their story, has drawn generations of

readers to ponder its meaning and message.

And as a result, the Bible has become the base

of an enormous edifice of interpretation and commentary

and debate, both in traditional settings

but also in academic, university, secular settings.

And from time to time, particularly in section

discussion, you will have occasion to consider the ways in

which certain biblical passages have been interpreted--sometimes

in very contradictory ways--over the centuries.

That can be a really fun and exciting part of the course.

A fourth goal of the course is to familiarize you with the

culture of ancient Israel as represented in the Bible against

the backdrop of its Ancient Near Eastern setting,

its historical and cultural setting, because the

archaeological discoveries that were referred to in the Ancient

Near East, reveal to us the spiritual and

cultural heritage of all of the inhabitants of the region,

including the Israelites.

And one of the major consequences of these finds is

the light that they have shed on the background and the origin of

the materials in the Bible.

So we now see that the traditions in the Bible did not

come out of a vacuum.

The early chapters of Genesis, Genesis 1 through 11--they're

known as the "Primeval History," which is a very unfortunate

name, because these chapters really are not best read or

understood as history in the conventional sense--but these 11

chapters owe a great deal to Ancient Near Eastern mythology.

The creation story in Genesis 1 draws upon the Babylonian epic

known as Enuma Elish.

We'll be talking about that text in some depth.

The story of the first human pair in the Garden of Eden,

which is in Genesis 2 and 3 has clear affinities with the Epic

of Gilgamesh, that's a Babylonian and

Assyrian epic in which a hero embarks on this exhausting

search for immortality.

The story of Noah and the flood, which occurs in Genesis 6

through 9 is simply an Israelite version of an older flood story

that we have found copies of: a Mesopotamian story called the

Epic of Atrahasis a flood story that we also have incorporated

in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Biblical traditions have roots that stretch deep into earlier

times and out into surrounding lands and traditions,

and the parallels between the biblical stories and Ancient

Near Eastern stories that they parallel has been the subject of

intense study. However, it isn't just the

similarity between the biblical materials and the Ancient Near

Eastern sources that is important to us.

In fact, in some ways it's the dissimilarity that is remarkably

important to us, the biblical transformation of

a common Near Eastern heritage in light of its radically new

conceptions of God and the world and humankind.

We'll be dealing with this in some depth, but I'll give you

one quick example.

We have a Sumerian story about the third millennium BCE,

going back 3000--third millennium, 3000 BCE.

It's the story of Ziusudra, and it's very similar to the

Genesis flood story of Noah.

In both of these stories, the Sumerian and the Israelite

story, you have a flood that is the result of a deliberate

divine decision; one individual is chosen to be

rescued; that individual is given very

specific instructions on building a boat;

he is given instructions about who to bring on board;

the flood comes and exterminates all living things;

the boat comes to rest on a mountaintop;

the hero sends out birds to reconnoiter the land;

when he comes out of the ark he offers a sacrifice to the

god--the same narrative elements are in these two stories.

It's just wonderful when you read them side by side.

So what is of great significance though is not

simply that the biblical writer is retelling a story that

clearly went around everywhere in ancient Mesopotamia;

they were transforming the story so that it became a

vehicle for the expression of their own values and their own

views. In the Mesopotamian stories,