RELS 255 Badly Behaving Bible

This course will explore ethically and morally questionable stories of the Hebrew Bible that early Jewish and Christian interpreters had difficulty receiving as scripture. In the interpretive tradition, many of these stories are whitewashed, rewritten, or spiritualized in dramatic ways in an effort to find righteous heroes in countless examples of selfishness, faithlessness, deception, and violence. We will study the various kinds of interpretive strategies employed by early Jewish and Christian communities in the Ancient Near East, as well as dynamic methods of interpretation that allow the biblical text to stand on its own in all its beautiful and messy ambiguity.