Course Objectives

1. To provide an opportunity for the student to gain an understanding of the major religious ideas, stories and symbols of the Hebrew Bible which have played a formative role in the history of Western civilization and of Judaism.
2. To provide an overview of Israelite history, and of the distinctive, socio-political problems and religious or ideological issues which distinguish five historical epochs from each other and from our time:
   the "patriarchal" era (sometimes called the "nomadic" era)
   the "settlement," i.e., era of settlement of Palestine by the Hebrews
   the "monarchy," from its foundation by King David to the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, who destroyed the temple built in Jerusalem by David's son and successor, Solomon, and ended the period of independent rule by the line of Davidic kings
   the "Babylonian Exile," i.e., the deportation of the Jews and the following half century of submission to their Babylonian conquerors
   the restoration or "Persian" period, when the Persians conquered the Babylonians and permitted the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a Jewish city. This is the beginning of the "era of the second temple."
   The five epochs are identified in boldfaced underlined headings on the following Schedule of Readings and Subjects.
3. To identify the major forms of literature associated with these epochs and the characteristic ideas by which they dealt with the issues of their day.
4. To develop an awareness of the way in which stories and traditions were first preserved orally, then recorded in writing, and finally reinterpreted and reworked to produce the present form of the Hebrew Bible.
5. To provide experience in applying the above kinds of knowledge so that students will be able to interpret the Bible or evaluate the interpretations of others with sensitivity and sophistication, and so that they will avoid some of the major problems of our own time: the tendencies (a) to read the English translation at face value ("literally"), as if the Bible had been written in our time by writers who shared our own experience and our own religious and cultural assumptions; (b) to miss the points made by ancient writers by projecting modern ideas and suppositions into their words; (c) to absorb culturally conditioned stereotypes and apply them unaware or uncritically to our own contemporaries.

http://www.bates.edu/Faculty/Philosophy%20and%20Religion/rel_235/235_objectives.html