Many students, fearing that their faith might be shaken, are frightened away by our courses that teach the Bible or other religious texts from a critical perspective. What might we do to make such students feel more comfortable? Let me begin with two incorrect strategies I have heard about over the years. The first is overly aggressive, represented by the professor who says as students enter on the first day of class: “Leave everything that you learned in Sunday school on the other side of the door of this classroom.” This is neither realistic nor inviting. The second is feeble, and involves saying to any student who offers any opinion, no matter how distant from scholarly norms: “That is very interesting” or some similar platitude. That abdicates our responsibility as scholars and teachers.
The necessity of attracting and keeping religiously committed students in my class hit home hard about twenty years ago when I was teaching at Brandeis, and some of my students were more observant Jews. One year, my enrollments tanked. I asked some students what happened, and they told me that my course, NEJS (Near Eastern and Judaic Studies) 111a, “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible,” had become nicknamed: Kefira [heresy] 111a. I wondered: How could I reengage those potential students, given my commitment to historical-critical methods?
I do not share the skepticism of some of my colleagues that historical criticism is dead, or should be dead. As historical-critical scholars, we need to realize that we cannot be absolutely sure of our conclusions, and that like any discipline, they may change over time as the result of new evidence or new hypotheses that better explain old evidence. But just because we can never be absolutely certain, we still must try, in our research and teaching, to reconstruct the real past of ancient Israel, or what a particular biblical text meant in the biblical period, or how and when it was composed. Such reconstructions are crucial so that students understand how all religions develop over time, and appreciate how different later religions understand early, significant religious texts in different ways, with none of these later interpretations having a monopoly on the truth. My introductory HB/OT course focuses on such reconstructions, the bread and butter of historical criticism. And though most entering students have never encountered this approach before, many find it interesting or even invigorating.
Yet—I know how uncomfortable these methods make many students from religious backgrounds. For that reason, in the very first class I introduce an image of a Monopoly board, and explain that my class is like the game of Monopoly. I ask them: What happens when you land on Free Parking? What happens when you roll snake-eyes (double-ones)? What happens when you roll double-sixes? The students invariably offer different answers to each of these questions because different house-rules or customs (should I say minhagim?) have developed over time. I explain that similarly different rules have arisen over time for understanding the Bible—one set takes it as a unified divine text, while another understands it as a human text that has developed over time, reflecting a wide array of authors and perspectives—and each set of rules is legitimate within its particular (academic and/or religious) framework.
I then clarify that the rules we will use in class are predominantly historical-critical ones, and that questions about the Bible, in class, should be answered using historical-critical premises. That is because I do not want my classroom to devolve into the type of chaos that ensues when a new player enters a game of Monopoly and rolls snake-eyes, and has expectations that differ from the other players. I develop this analogy by explaining that I am not implying that other rules are always irrelevant or are absolutely wrong, but if a student answers a historical-critical question with a traditional, non-critical answer, they have confused what “game” we are playing. And rather than saying, “that’s nice,” or rebuking them for answering from a religiously-based perspective in an academic setting, I simply say: “Monopoly.” That word becomes a code for: Remember that you are in an academic class, in an academic setting, and only certain questions and perspectives are deemed relevant or appropriate here. (But outside of class, you can ask me or others whatever you would like.) This is not, to my mind, so different from a teacher of Euclidean geometry responding to a student who insists that parallel lines do meet by saying: “We do not entertain that possibility in this class—but feel free to find a class from Professor Ploni-Almoni in Bolyai-Lobachevskian geometry.”
But in contrast to that Mathematic professor, who decides to exclude non-Euclidean geometry completely from the syllabus, I do incorporate non-critical biblical perspectives in my introductory HB/OT class. I have done this more frequently in recent years (see https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/pedagogy-refashioning-academic-biblical-studies ) because I better recognize that history of interpretation and reception history are part of academic biblical studies. I try to include a wide variety of interpretations, including Jewish, Christian and Muslim, African-American, Asian, LGBTQ+, and feminist. This allows students who are religiously affiliated, or are part of one of these groups, to feel validated, by showing them and other students that their traditions count.
I use other means to help show students who are initially resistant to historical-critical methods that such methods are, at the very least, reasonable. For example, most students, even those from non-religious backgrounds, resist source criticism, and do not understand how and why a redactor (or the compiler), would join together disparate texts, and could possibly create a readable text composed of two originally separate pieces. For years I have offered this assignment (sometimes as a group assignment): Take two accounts on the same topic from different news outlets (e.g., Fox and CNN) and combine them into a single story without cutting anything or adding any transition words; both sources should be used in their totality, in their original order. I then give out the combined news accounts in class and the students disentangle their co-students’ news stories by looking for contradictions, doublets, and variations in style; I then ask the students to reassemble the original two stories, and even to guess what kind of news outlets they came from. This is a safe form of source criticism—but then when I apply the students’ insights from this secular exercise to narratives such as the flood story in Genesis 6-9, they are suddenly more receptive to the Torah’s composite nature. Secular analogies help break down religious resistance; similarly, when I make students aware of the problems of reconstructing the original text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a surprise to most students who thought we have a single, “Sinaitic” text of this play—they appreciate that recovering the original text (whatever that might mean) of the much older Bible has merit.
Let me offer one final example of what might be called “breaking down” religious resistance to critical perspectives. A major assumption of critical biblical scholarship is that not all (if any!) words attributed to a prophet is by that prophet, and is true prophecy. This is disturbing to most students in the class, so I tried something new this year. After asking them at home to do a form-critical exercise on prophetic call narratives—the texts where the prophet is appointed to his role (e.g. sections of Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 1, and Ezekiel 1-3), they write together, during class, a call-narrative for me to deliver as a prophet to Duke’s student body. They have fun doing this, (learn something about form criticism,) and suddenly realize how easy it is to write, even in biblical parallelism, a pretty convincing piece of prophecy. As a result, they begin to wonder—how easy was it in antiquity to forge and circulate new prophesies? How might we really distinguish the true prophet from the imposter?
I tried something else new this year, with this current essay in mind. A student in my class wrote as part of an assignment on Ezekiel 18, which abolishes intergenerational punishment: “It's crazy how prophets/biblical authors can change the script so often; do you think they got questioned a lot for these little changes?” To answer her, I distributed a handout with seven different texts that reflect the Bible’s multiple views concerning intergenerational punishment, and we had a class discussion on how both historical-critical and traditional interpretation would explain these differences. I had done a similar exercise from a historical-critical perspective before, but had never thought of including how traditional interpretation would explain the multiplicity of theologies found in the Bible—but I felt it was important to include that perspective, and to enfranchise the students in the class who held such positions.
I need to come clean. I am somewhat disingenuous in some of these activities, especially in Monopoly and in offering the traditional interpretations concerning changing views about intergenerational punishment. I do not believe that all and any biblical interpretations are equally valid—it would be absurd, for example, from any linguistic perspective, to render Genesis 1:1, “When God began to create ice cream and sorbet.” I do try, throughout the semester, to convert students to my (standard scholarly) methods or ways of reading the Bible, and I am very gratified that as the semester progresses, I see students appreciating these ways of reading. (Is this any different than a professor of literature enjoying seeing students previously trained in New Criticism gaining facility during the semester in more recent ways of reading a literary text?) But I try to do this in a safe enough manner that makes them feel that their religious world need not collapse. It may help that as an observant Jew I wear a kippah while teaching, and this is a visible signal from “the professor” that religious life and criticism can fit together. This certainly helped me when I was a pretty traditional undergraduate in Nahum Sarna’s classes at Brandeis—he wore a kippah while teaching traditional Jewish texts, though I am not advocating emulating this practice just for fun or pedagogical usefulness.
I also, on the first day of classes, show my students The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critical and Religiously, which I wrote with Peter Enns (who is Protestant), and with the late Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., and I have a link to the book on my syllabus. This book originated as a set of lectures the three of us gave in 2010 at the University of Pennsylvania: “The Challenge of Reading the Bible Today: Can the Bible Be Read Both Critically and Religiously? Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant Perspectives.” (This sounds like a bad joke: A Jew, a former evangelical and a Jesuit walked into a bar… but it was a real lecture, thanks to Jeffrey Tigay and Beth Wenger.) I expected to see the usual dozen or so students who come to such talks, with a smattering of retired community members. Well over one hundred people filled the hall, teaching me, and I hope persuading some who are reading this piece, that there is serious interest in how the academic and religious perspectives might fit together, and that we would do well to consider this in our teaching.
Even if I don’t convince each and every student of the validity of historical criticism, I think that they better understand the reasonableness of its methods and conclusions, and thus are more open to others who are interested in the Bible for reasons beyond personal religious guidance. I hope my students will avoid declaiming apodictically, “The Bible says” on any issue, or offering one text only to show how the Bible must unambiguously guide contemporary life. I also hope that the exposure to a variety of methods, including several religious readings of the texts, will help students be more tolerant toward people from other religious traditions. (I had an especially gratifying experience this semester when a Christian student told me that he now appreciates why everyone might not understand Isaiah 53 as referring to Jesus.) This type of tolerance and understanding is, to my mind, fundamental to liberal arts education.
Marc Brettler, a biblical scholar, is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University.