Graduate Courses 2023–2024
Some graduate courses may be open to undergraduates with the consent of the instructor.
Autumn 2023
Co-undergraduate/Graduate Courses
BIBL 31000 (= JWSC 20120; NEHC 20504/30504; RLST 11004; HIJD 31004) Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.
Autumn T/Th 12:30 – 1:50 pm
Simeon Chavel
The course surveys the contents of the Hebrew Bible, through the concepts of book culture, literature, history, and religion. It introduces critical questions regarding the HB's figures and ideas, its literary qualities and anomalies, the history of its composition and transmission, its relation to other artifacts from the period, its place in the history and society of ancient Israel and Judea, and its relation to the larger culture of the ancient Near East in the Iron Age and Persian period (12th-4th cents. BCE).
Note: This course counts as a Gateway course for RLST majors/minors.
RETH 33600 (= JWSC 23600, RLST 23600) Evil: Myth, Symbol, and Reality
Autumn T/Th 2:00 – 3:20 pm
William Schweiker
From the horrors of the Shoah to violence suffered by individuals, the question of the origin, meaning, and reality of evil done by humans has vexed thinkers throughout the ages. This seminar is an inquiry into the problem of evil on three registers of reflection: myth, symbol, and reality. We will be exploring important philosophical, Jewish, and Christian texts. These include Martin Buber, Good and Evil, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, Edward Farley, Good and Evil, Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality and Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm. There will also be a viewing of the movie Seven (1995) directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Accordingly, the seminar probes the reality of evil and the symbolic and mythic resources of religious traditions to articulate the meaning and origin of human evil. The question of “theodicy” is then not the primary focus given the seminar’s inquiry into the fact and reality of human evil. Each student will submit a 5-7 page critical review of either Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century or Susan Neiman’s, Evil in Modern Thought. Each student also will write a 15-page (double spaced;12pt font) paper on one or more of the texts read in the course with respect to her or his own research interests.
PQ: Students must have done previous work in theology and/or ethics.
LING 39406 (= JWSC 29406, LING 29406) Formal Diachronic Semantics in Hebrew and Other Languages
Autumn M/W 3:00 – 4:20 pm
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal
The course seeks to bring together two sub-disciplines within linguistics: historical linguistics and formal semantics. Both of these sub-disciplines have evolved from distant intellectual fields: the first comes from the philological world, while the second has its origins in the world of mathematical logic. Recently, there has been a rapprochement between these fields dealing mostly with the study of changes of meaning, grammaticalization and reanalysis. This course aims to examine the research paradigms that attempt to integrate them and explore new methodologies for building bridges between them. The course will focus on examples from Hebrew, but there is no requirement of Hebrew, and studies and examples from many other languages will be provided as well.
Graduate Courses
BIBL 50902 (= HIJD 50902) The Book of Kings: Critical Review
Autumn
Simeon Chavel
Students read the entire Book of Kings to learn its shape, scope, and character. Read scholarship on major and local aspects to learn the field. Lay groundwork to write seminar paper in winter course BIBL 52800.
PQ: One year Biblical Hebrew + one text course. Expectation that participants will take BIBL 52800 The Book of Kings: Seminar in the winter.
HIJD 45400 (= HREL 45401, ISLM 45400, RLVC 45400, RLST 21107, JWSC 21107) Readings in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed
Autumn
James Robinson
A careful study of select passages in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, focusing on the method of the work and its major philosophical-theological themes, including: divine attributes, creation vs. eternity, prophecy, the problem of evil and divine providence, law and ethics, and the final aim of human existence.
LING 46001 Causative Language
Autumn W 11:30 am – 2:20 pm
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal
Causation stands at the heart of all sciences, and as such, philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists explore the exact nature of this concept as they seek to understand how causal structures are represented in the human cognitive systems. This course aims to understand what causative constructions are, what they assert, what they presupposed and to what extent they differ one from the other. In addition, it will explore how the semantics of these linguistic expressions are related to the way we model our causal knowledge of the world. In this context we will explore the uniqueness of the linguistic inquiry about causation and how it corresponds with studies on causation in philosophy and in cognitive sciences. In the course we will also consider typological studies, with focus on causative constructions in English and in Hebrew.
RETH 33300 (= ISLM 33300) Reading Your Neighbor’s Scripture: Comparative Reading and the Logic of Scripture
Autumn 5:00 – 7:50 pm Th
Laurie Zoloth
Scriptural Reasoning is a method of approaching the scholarly study of texts of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and the Quran, by reading them as if they are to be understood as in conversation with one another, and as in reception communities that have historically understood them as such. This seminar will explore the practices and methods of a distinctive academic methodology of study, as well as the theoretical and philosophical scaffolding that has emerged from these practices. We will consider both the scholarly work that extends and recommends the practice, and the critiques of the practice. Reading from the perspectives of theology and philosophy, we will consider how the academic reading of Scriptures frames the narrative and the ethical perspectives within the text and how that framing might be disrupted/repaired/interrogated by new exegetical interpretations. Scriptural Reasoning is both a method and a feature of the academy (in journals, in a section at the AAR, and in scholarly books and articles); and it is also a way of making Scriptural reception and interpretation publicly legible. The seminar will allow graduate students an entrance into understanding the Scriptures of their own tradition or research interest, and those of others, with which they may not be conversant, and thus create the possibility for new avenues of comparative scholarship.
Winter 2024
Co-undergraduate/Graduate Courses
BIBL 32906 (= JWSC 22906, NEHC 22906/32906, RLST 22906) The Book of Ezekiel
Winter
Simeon Chavel
A seminar for reading the Book of Ezekiel (in English; optional reading group for those who read biblical Hebrew), the Bible's most bizarre and challenging Prophetic work. It features Ezekiel's close encounters with a brutal divine, instantaneous transportation to future spaces and faraway places, dream-scenes that become real, mortifying dramatizations, and surreal sensory overload. Ezekiel says he played the role of a crude mime, a confounding cryptic, and an erotic singer. This charged and disturbing work generated a variety of literary and speculative Jewish and Christian traditions, like the Apocalyptic and the Mystical. Modern Bible critics discount its retrospective frame, consider it a repository of historical materials, and probe Ezekiel for personality disorders. We will engage it the way it presents itself to us, as literature, in a which a character tells his glorious and troubled story, and explore its frame, content, poetics, Judean literary traditions, contemporary Babylonian scene, and historical message.
HIST 33521 (= JWSC 23521, HIST 23521) The Future of Israel
Winter 3:30 – 4:50 pm T/Th
Ofer Ashkenazi
This class considers key aspects of contemporary Israeli society, culture and politics, and examines their potential future trajectories. Within this framework, we will discuss the historical background of various developments in contemporary Israeli ideologies, experiences, fears and ambitions. In analyzing the evolution and impacts of the tensions that characterize Israeli society and culture today, we will examine various potential resolutions for these tensions. The sources we will discuss in class include official policy statements, speeches, and public opinion polls, alongside visual arts, films, science fiction literature and popular music. The diversity of sources reflects the diversity of voices—of beliefs, aspirations and self-perceptions—within the Israeli society. The acknowledgement of this diversity would not allow us to predict the future, but it would grant us with solid foundations for the understanding of the current challenges, of possible future trajectories, and their long-term implications.
HIST 33522 (= JWSC 23522, HIST 33522) German-Jewish Visual Culture
Winter 3:00 – 4:20 pm M/W
Ofer Ashkenazi
Ever since Jewish emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century, German-Jewish culture evolved through the experience of intercultural encounters, acculturation, dissimilation, migration, and persecution. After 1933 this endeavor has been transplanted and fostered outside of Germany as well. The course focuses on the ways German-Jewish visual culture negotiated the varying experiences of Jews in Germany and in migration, contemplated Jews’ agency in the face of uncertainty and crisis, and assigned meaning to views, beliefs and fears. In considering sources such as films, photographs, and comic books that were produced by Jews in Germany and German-Jews abroad, we will explore some often-overlooked yet fundamental aspects of German Jewish history and its perception by various contemporaries. Contrary to traditional scholarship on German-Jewish culture, this course will go beyond the paradigm of the nation-state to highlight the transnational encounters, interrelations and influences that shaped the German-Jewish experience and its negotiation in visual imagery.
Graduate Courses
BIBL 52800 (= HIJD 52800) The Book of Kings: Seminar
Winter
Simeon Chavel
Seminar on select topics in the Book of Kings, with a focus on completing a major research paper.
PQ: BIBL 50902.
BIBL 55800 (= HIJD 41780, RLST 21780) Novellas of the Hebrew Bible: Jonah, Ruth, Esther, Job
Seminar using theory of narrative to interact with scholarship on biblical narrative and analyze four narrative works in the Hebrew Bible.
PQ: 1 yr Biblical Hebrew + 1 text course
DVPR 36524 Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
Winter
Florian Klinger
This seminar is a study of Arendt's lecture course on Kant's aesthetics – a text that Arendt did not live to turn into the book titled Judging that was supposed to conclude the trilogy The Life of the Mind. We will consider the conception of the political that Arendt proposes in the lecture. What does it mean to be free? Why is freedom found only in our relating to one another? How can I include an other in my view? What is it to be a citizen of the world? Can we conceive of a planetary right to pay visits? We will also include other text by Arendt that help to understand the lecture, and we will read the texts by Kant on which Arendt draws: selections from the Critique of the Power of Judgment and from the Anthropology, and the essays Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, and On Eternal Peace. The class is designed for Arendt novices and returning readers alike. Readings and discussion in English. Undergraduates by permission only.
Spring 2024
Co-undergraduate/graduate Courses
BIBL 32700 (= JWSC 22702, RLST 22700, NEHC 22700/32700) Biblical Law
Spring
Simeon Chavel
This course will examine the laws in the Torah/Pentateuch and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for their legal, social, and moral reasoning; their style; their meaning in literary works, as literature; and their historical setting. It will compare them to laws in other ancient works like the Hammurabi monument(s).
Graduate Courses
BIBL 45100 (= RLST 21550) Innerbiblical Exegesis
Spring
Jeffrey Stackert
This course will explore the phenomenon of literary revision in the Hebrew Bible and, to a limited extent, its precursors and successor texts. In addition to analyzing various examples of innerbiblical exegesis, we will consider the theoretical issues related to literary revision, including the question of criteria for determining literary dependence and direction of dependence and the intents of texts that reuse source material. All biblical texts will be read in their original languages.
PQ: Strong Biblical Hebrew.
BIBL 45400 (= RLST 22303) Second Isaiah
Spring
Jeffrey Stackert
This course is a reading course on Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66). It is meant both for students who have completed the first year Hebrew sequence in the Divinity School and others who would like to read Second Isaiah in Hebrew. We will focus on interpreting texts by attending to their grammatical, literary, and historical features.
PQ: One year of Biblical Hebrew.
HIST 59201 Modern Jewish History: Essential Topics, Questions, and Texts
Spring Th 12:30 am – 3:20 pm
Kenneth Moss
Intensive survey of recent (and some select classic) scholarship on modern Jewish political, cultural, intellectual, social, and economic history on a global scale, coupled with some essential primary sources.