When they arrive in my introductory course, students have strong assumptions about what the Bible is and how to read it. Many of these assumptions will be familiar to other instructors: that the Bible is a unified text, that we read it to extract homiletical messages, that we can neatly divide between an original message and later corruptions, that every portion of the Bible is about God, and so on. In my experience, students often hold these ideas regardless of their religious beliefs. While related to the familiar issues, which Marc Brettler discusses, associated with presenting historical-critical frameworks that challenge religious believers, the problems I face are somewhat different. Students may happily nod along, for instance, as we discuss the contradictions between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. But when prompted to analyze another doublet, the “you are my sister” stories in Genesis 12 and 20, the same students conflate the two narratives and derive from both a shared moral about “trust in God.” In other words, the conflict is not with explicitly held beliefs about the text, but with a hermeneutic methodology they have internalized, often at a level that is not fully conscious.
Many instructors address this issue through explicit methodological discussion, and I do too, using texts like James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible to help students become aware of their own assumptions. But I have a second, perhaps less conventional strategy, suggested to me by my senior colleague Rachel Havrelock when I first taught the course: I teach a biblical novel. I have three reasons for doing so. First, students know from high-school English courses “how to read a novel,” and by practicing that skill with biblical stories, you encourage them to transfer those skills to biblical texts. For instance, when they read Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, students have little trouble identifying how the protagonist Dinah’s descent to Egypt parallels the story of Joseph, drawing inferences about how gender inflects those two journeys, or even recognizing how Diamant’s depiction of these journeys draws on stories of Jewish migration from the “Old Country” to America. Once they have done so, they find it far easier to perform parallel interpretive work in Genesis—to identify surprising connections between characters; to contrast parallel narratives in social, human terms; and to speculate about how a writer’s context might inflect the story they tell. Or if we read Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, I bring in an earlier draft of the novel’s ending, published independently as a short story; they easily construct theories about how and why Hurston revised, which I find makes it far easier for them to perform parallel work with, say, Judges 4 and 5.
Second, these novels usually contain their own, fictional accounts of how biblical stories are created. Novelists, after all, are often influenced by academic scholarship, and many students find ideas about the text’s development easier to follow when presented in fictional, narrative form. In The Red Tent, Dinah discovers that her brothers, to justify their own crimes, have manufactured a false story in which she was raped. An evangelical student who usually shrugged off historical criticism as “irrelevant” found that this scene clarified the course’s profound stakes: that biblical stories reflect particular storytellers’ versions of thing, that there is always a story beneath the story. Similarly, Hurston’s novel places Moses’ Jewishness in doubt, making it (possibly) a story Miriam circulates, which proves crucial to the Israelites’ liberation. Miriam is initially hiding her laxness in watching baby Moses; the story then becomes a propaganda effort to preserve Israelite morale. Dissecting these motives, the class can then reflect on the varying demands that the stories in Exodus answered for their composers and early audiences. When these novels are “self-reflective” about storytelling, they help students reflect about biblical narrative. Because such reflection is cognitively demanding and (for some) religiously challenging, a novel’s indirection and entertainment are pedagogical assets.
Finally, teaching a novel allows me to offer creative writing as an alternate interpretive mode to literary or historical analysis. I teach the novel alongside other, brief narratives: a short story like Ursuala Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them,” for instance, or midrashim about Eve’s creation. I ask students to notice how specifically their writers are attending to the biblical text’s details—exploiting small linguistic questions, plot contradictions, fleeting images, and so on. In one assignment for the course, the students write their own “midrash,” a short narrative which “solves a problem” in one of the biblical stories we have read, while drawing on specifics of other biblical texts. Students enjoy this assignment, which for me is an intrinsic pedagogical value. Moreover, students who find the analysis we generally practice difficult sometimes flourish when asked to write creatively. Some enter the course (which I teach as a general-education elective, mostly to non-majors) with comparatively weak analytic skills. Others are frustrated by the gap between their religious views and the bulk of course discussions. For instance, while I discourage Christological readings of Hebrew Bible material in class discussion and analytic essays, I point out that it is perfectly valid in their creative-writing assignment. One student wrote a beautiful “midrash” explaining Pharoah’s imprisonment of the cupbearer and baker, heavily indebted to Christian martyrdom narratives. In general, much of my course estranges the Bible—suggesting that a text many of them assume to be personal and accessible is in fact foreign and difficult. Creative writing allows them to engage the Bible on their own terms.
I build lesson plans around comparing the contemporary text with its biblical sources. For instance, I start a session by having them list changes Hurston makes to Exodus, which they do easily. That list always includes her placing of Moses’ Israelite origins in doubt, so I “choose” that one and ask why she did so. They usually generate reasons focused on Hurston’s motives as a Black woman writing in the twentieth century—elevating the agency of Miriam, who creates the story of the Israelite Moses (and who, I suggest, is a surrogate for the novelist herself); or questioning the Bible’s truthfulness through this example; or using Moses’ birth story as a model for how “race” is always a fiction. Then I turn back to Exodus—anything in the biblical original that might be motivating her? This takes more time, but eventually, they notice how Moses in Exodus is also positioned “in-between”—that he is called an “Egyptian man” in Midian, that he names his son after his exile, that he needs an Israelite “translator” in Aaron, and so on. Wouldn’t the obvious choice, I then ask, be for the biblical authors make Moses as Israelite as possible? They offer different answers: homiletical possibilities about the value of diversity or difference; historical speculation about Ancient Israel’s relation to Egypt; philological hunches that different sources are being reconciled. I do not adjudicate between these—rather, my goal is to get them to recognize how Hurston has helped them see something in Exodus they might otherwise have missed. The model of Hurston helps them imagine the biblical authors as writers making choices—rather than, as they often enter the course, simply thinking of the Bible as a fixed, already-given text. To use Hurston’s novel in this way, you need not be a specialist in reading novels (indeed, I am not). Rather, I think of them as commentaries, or midrashim; their value is not intrinsic, but rather in being placed next to the biblical story for comparison.
There are drawbacks to teaching a novel in this course. One semester is hardly enough time for an introductory course to the Bible as it is, especially because few of my students will ever encounter the Bible academically again. I sometimes feel guilty about devoting a week or two to more familiar, modern material. Moreover, precisely the domesticizing effect that reading a novel has can be dangerous because students inappropriately infer that biblical texts are “just like a novel.” If you want students to appreciate how Jacob and Esau figure political collectives in the Ancient Near East, for instance, as much as or more than they do richly psychological individuals, reading The Red Tent can be somewhat counter-productive. Yet, even here, I think students intuitively realize that novels are being introduced as a comparandum that is “the same but different.” After reading a modern novel, for instance, students are far more attuned to (and interested in) the famous concision and spareness of biblical style, which newly seems to them a problem worth investigating. As I see it, the ultimate goal of teaching a novel in this course is not that they “read the Bible like a novel,” even if that is an intermediate, heuristic procedure. Rather my aim is that they become more conscious about how they intuitively read novels and how they intuitively read biblical texts—and they start to think for themselves about how they might modify their intuitive hermeneutic assumptions based on new ideas and self-reflection.
Raphael Magarik is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago.