DrJim

Howdy.

Some collegues of mine have started work on a reader of scriptural and other religious writings for use in World Religions type courses at secular universities and it looks as though I will end up contributing a section on the Hebrew Bible and Judaism. It is very much in the early stages: the finished product is still a few years away. We do have a publisher interested already, so it looks like some planning is in order to keep them entertained.

Most of the existing scripural readers tend to keep commentary to a bare minimum. One of the selling points of our text is that there would be considerable commentary appended to the passages and introductory essays to help give readers a lot of context etc. We also want to highlight how, against the prevailing opinion in many students, that religious books "mean" more than what the words therein actually say. Scriptures are "symbols" of authority (e.g., the preacher waving a Bible cannot hope to "shake" meaning on people!), of emotional release and devotion (Jews kissing the Torah scroll; Sihks treating the Adi Granth as a living guru), and so on. We also want to bring up the idea of sacred languages etc. (e.g. The sanskrit vedas that hardly anyone in India can understand still play an important part in rituals).
But what texts and what kind of commentary would be most useful in an easy to handle book for students in the first few years of university study?

I would be interested to know what sort of texts everyone thinks might be representative of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament and what sort of commentary might be most helpful. If anyone has taught from, or learned from scriptural readers in a World Religion class, I would be pleased to hear what you thought was good bad or ugly about it.

Here are a few things I am thinking about
Jewish Bible/ Old Testament: usually "biblical scholars" divorce the JB/OT from its current setting within Judaism and Christianity in favour of reconstructing its original cultural contexts. I'm wondering if this is wise. Is there any one section of the JB/OT which might be a good text to illustrate the differences between the attempts to recover the "original" setting in a culture and later interpretations characteristic of Judaism and Christianity? I was thinking of the Akeda (Gen 22), the binding of Isaac, but I'm open to suggestians.

For Judaism, there are some nice short statements from various Orthodox, Conservative and Reform thinkers (e.g., Pitsburgh platform), that can be unpacked.

For the Rabbinic texts, I was thinking of the Mishnah Berakhot 1 and subsequent Talmudic discussions concerning the Shema since it embraces both quotes from scripture: the texts that make up the Shema prayer, and the development of further tradition in the Rabbinic discussions, and ties in well with a long standing practice of reciting Shema at home and in the synagogue.

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful if you could respond in this thread or a private message.



Thanks in advance.

JR Linville
University of Lethbridge