RELS 3310

Did Moses write the Bible? Has it been perfectly preserved since the time of ancient Israel? If not, what is so special about it that people over 3,000 years later still try to follow it in such contradictory ways? This course will supply you with tools to find out for yourself. You will learn the basics of what is in the Hebrew Bible (which Christians call the “Old Testament”), a classic of global culture and one of those books people may expect you to know. But it is also more powerful than that; people do not try to obey “classics” like Homer or Shakespeare. Yet historically, the Hebrew Bible is not one book at all but a library of disparate texts put together by a conquered people. If “history is written by the winners” how did it become so important?