In my first semester as an adjunct instructor, I was tasked with teaching an introductory course on the Hebrew Bible to 38 undergraduate students. At the time, I also had teaching responsibilities at my home institution and was in the process of readjusting to my first semester of in-person instruction since the start of COVID. As a result, I was simultaneously thrilled and terrified. I was thrilled to be teaching an introduction—for the first time with full control over the syllabus, assignments, and grading—to my own field of study; but I was terrified that I and my students would quickly burn out. I felt a strong need to create meaningful assignments that encouraged student engagement but that didn’t result in a mountain of written work for me to grade—no small task! It was this set of circumstances that gave rise to my favorite assignment of the entire semester. I tasked my students with creating dating profiles for biblical characters.

The purpose of this assignment, as I explained to my students, was twofold. First, having to prepare profiles of their own would help them see more clearly what information is given (and missing) in a text. This, I thought, could help them confront both the uncertainty we all face when reading ancient texts and the importance of using all available data—including material both from other places in and outside of the text itself—to inform our conclusions. Second, my hope was that it would empower them to feel comfortable making their own interpretive decisions with creativity, which might also help them realize more about what leads scholars and other readers to interpret texts in certain ways. This was my attempt at showing them that biblical interpretation, and the interpretation of ancient texts more generally, is far from settled, and that there are always new ways of reading the available evidence. It was an invitation to them to be part of the conversation instead of just a recipient of handed-down knowledge.

I designed the assignment to be low stakes (for more on the benefit of low-stakes assignments, see the helpful overview provided be DePaul’s Teaching Commons here) by making it just one of four short assignments (graded out of 10 points) that students were to complete over the course of the semester. The due date was scheduled on the syllabus for the day we started Samuel, so students had their choice of characters from Genesis to Judges about whom to write their profile. They needed to include, at minimum, that character's interests and what they were looking for in a partner in the profile. In order to receive full points, however, they also needed to include at least three biblical citations that helped explain their choices. I wanted to avoid grading students on their graphic design abilities (my own being nonexistent), so I specified that the profile could be text-only but that they should feel free to be as creative in format as they'd like.

The results were spectacular. Students created profiles of everyone from Eve to Samson, with some students reaching even to characters on which we did not spend much time, such as Esau and Aaron. (Please forgive me, fellow instructors of Hebrew Bible. I had one semester to cover the entire canon in three, 50-minute lectures per week.) In fact, the freedom to select their own characters helped address the limitations of a one semester course by giving students the opportunity to dive deeper into stories we had only briefly mentioned, meaning that they spent more time with the biblical text. It also heightened their awareness of the dynamics of relationships and marriage in the Hebrew Bible, a topic that we did not dedicate a class to but that was clearly highlighted in creating these profiles. By being forced to pay attention to the varieties of relationships the Hebrew Bible describes, students’ previously held ideas about topics like “biblical marriage” were challenged.

Most importantly, the assignment did what it was designed to do—it pushed students to develop their skills as close readers and to practice extracting as much information as possible from the text. This assignment provided them with a framework to act as interpreters in their own right, to select a character of interest to them and to probe the story for details, while the act of filling in the gaps in the biblical account forced them to confront the limitations of our evidence.

And while we did spend some time in class on the reception histories of selected verses and topics, this assignment gave them first-hand experience in a way my explanations could not. In other words, it demonstrated to them how interpretations come to vary so widely, what aspects of our own experience as readers might lead to such different interpretations, and why the task of biblical interpretation is never as straightforward as it might first appear.

Below are some of the highlights, including a few of the most successful complete profiles.

File Title: “Tinder Theology Project”

Websites: “Single Genesis Hearts” “Hebrew Mingle”
Instagram: @promisedson (Isaac)

Profile Quotes:

“Currently Listening To: ‘Hey There Delilah’ by the Plain White T’s; ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ by Taylor Swift” –Samson

“First human to walk this earth, first human to steal your heart.” –Adam

“Last night I was reading the book of Numbers and realized I didn’t have yours.” –David

“If your name starts with R and rhymes with ‘achel’ then swipe right, otherwise swipe left.” –Jacob

“I have traveled extensively on my yacht.” –Noah

Profiles:

Grading: 10 possible points

5 pts for a submitted profile

+1 pt for explicit inclusion of a character’s interests (either in a list or “I’m interested in/my hobbies include/in my free time I like to…” etc.)

+1 pt for explicit inclusion of what a character is looking for in a partner

+1 pt for each biblical citation up to the three indicated in the assignment instructions

Reflection:

Readers will notice that all of the profiles above are of male characters. In fact, and even though both classes (I used this assignment two semesters in a row) were not disproportionately composed of male students, the students by and large disproportionately selected male biblical characters for their profiles. Additionally, when female characters were selected, the profiles tended to be sparser or to involve significantly more imagined details that the student created to fill out the profile. I am careful to include readings about women and to lecture about the women of the Hebrew Bible in my course, so my best guess is that students were simply able to find more biblical material that they could use to support profiles of male characters than of female characters. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the emphasis on male characters and their actions in the Hebrew Bible, but I was disappointed by it. If I use this assignment again, I will make a concerted effort to encourage students to profile characters other than Adam, Noah, and the patriarchs—the “greatest hits” of both semesters. In a context where students have more familiarity with the Hebrew Bible, I would consider making a list of “unavailable” characters in order to push students out of their comfort zones and get them to engage with less well-known biblical figures.

Additionally, while I was worried that this assignment might be too trivial (and some readers may think that after seeing these examples), I was pleasantly surprised by how seriously many of the students took it. Several students attended office hours to ask questions about how to approach the assignment, and it was by far the assignment mentioned most frequently in my course evaluations (only positively, if you can believe it). In class, we debriefed together about how this assignment relates to what we are doing in the course, and we specifically discussed how, as readers, we are often interpreting what the text says but also filling the gaps of what it doesn’t, which is what the assignment is meant to imitate. No two students created the same profile—even though many of them selected the same character—and this, too, was instructive. At its core, this assignment was about practicing interpretation. The required biblical citations forced the students to ground their dating profiles in details from the text, but the format and creative license allowed them to do something equally important, in my mind: it allowed them to have fun while developing these important skills. In a semester where I heard horror stories of attendance in lecture classes dropping by more than 50%, I have to think that combining these learning goals with opportunities for fun contributed to my fairly steady attendance rate—allowing space for fun in submitted assignments also signaled to my students that there might be similar opportunities for fun in class. And, although some instructors might be uncomfortable with this rationale, I will admit that part of the motivation for giving this assignment was because I anticipated it would be fun for me as well—and I was right. With 38 students and a host of other responsibilities, I knew that grading could be a slog if I let it, so I spent a lot of time thinking of assignments that would be not only instructional for my students but also enjoyable for me to grade. For this assignment, I made the grading straightforward so that I could focus on savoring the good work that my students had produced. I’ve never laughed more while grading than I did with these dating profiles, and I hope other instructors will adopt or adapt this assignment for their own classes—we could all, students and instructors alike, stand to have a bit more fun!

Allison Hurst is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.