u/PST-Chicago

I listened with interest today to the most recent Drive episode on NMR blood analysis with Jim Olvos. It wasn't so much the specific content, although there were definitely nuggets of value, but just the fact that this was a probing interview with a genuine expert, which is what Peter has always done best. A future of AMAs and episodes that, for all practical purposes, are long essays read out loud (like #401 about curiosity) would not be worth the subscription. I've worried that the good guests are fighting shy of association with Peter for now, but time may fix that. Anyway, I am in this for what I can learn while doing my zone 2, so I hope this and a couple of other recent interviews represent a turning point.

I am curious whether anyone here has taken the online Yale course on the Tanakh with Professor Christine Hayes, and if so, what they think of it. In my old age I am acquiring a pretty good college education while on the treadmill or stationary bike. Yale University has an especially good set of offerings at Open Yale Courses (oyc.yale.edu/courses), although they tend to be ten to twenty years old. I am now halfway through the unfortunately titled “Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible).” Despite the name, it is absolutely from a Jewish perspective. You never hear the words OT again, and it is completely unconcerned with the alleged foreshadowing of events that obsessed the Church Fathers and their successors. Its focus is strictly on understanding the Bible on its own terms in relation to the history of Israel and of the scriptures themselves.

For context, I am a non-Jewish atheist with an interest in the late classical era and the roots of our civilization. I started this because I felt limited by the shallowness of my own understanding of both the Hebrew and Greek Bibles. For example, I had never heard of Yeheskel Kaufmann’s theories about the revolutionary nature of Israelite monotheism, thinking of it more in terms of what you end up with if you eliminate gods one by one rather than an entirely new model of God as absolutely supreme, not bound, as pagan gods were, by older and deeper forces. As another example, the Sunday school of my protestant boyhood often referred to biblical times as if they comprised a single era, with little sense of the astonishing depth of Israel’s history back to the bronze age and the progression from events purely mythical to those anchored in well attested events. Or another, breaking the Christian habit of perceiving God’s promise of redemption as individual and spiritual rather than collective and very much in the physical world. There are many more.

I thoroughly doubt anyone could come close to understanding the Bible just be diving into the text whether in Hebrew or modern translation. A framework is necessary, and I have found this course a good place to start. Has anyone else found it to be so? Or found it otherwise?