The Bible as Literature

This course will study what it means to read the Bible in a literary way: what literary devices does it contain, and how has it influenced the way we read literature today? What new patterns and meanings emerge? This course will examine the structures and modes of the Biblical books; the formation of the canon and the history of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books; questions of authorship; its literary genres; histories of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary; the redaction, division, and ordering of biblical texts; the cultural, political, and intellectual worlds within which these texts were written.