In my experience, teaching introductory-level classes in Bible and ancient Judaism is a constant process of realizing that things that are intuitive to me are not at all intuitive to my students. Often, this involves the core concepts that I’m teaching. For instance, I walked into my first introductory class thinking that it was obvious that biblical texts were not written in the order in which they appear canonically. I was quickly disabused of this notion when students who fully accepted the idea of human authorship nevertheless assumed that, e.g., the Priestly creation narrative (Gen 1:1–2:3) was surely older than the depictions of creation in the psalms. This opened my eyes to the fact that compositional complexity is actually not remotely obvious without specialist training. It was a humbling reminder of the pedagogical imperative to step outside of our own professional worlds, even as we draw on that expertise.
Sometimes, however, my students are unfamiliar with much more nitty-gritty aspects of our field. By far the most common is the format of biblical citations. Again, the first time I taught an introductory class, I assumed that the chapter-and-verse references that I’d put on the syllabus were self-explanatory. You can imagine my surprise when, for the first few weeks of the semester, students were consistently showing up to class having done the wrong biblical readings. Through their perspective, I came to a realization similar to the one about composition history, though considerably more mundane: the jumble of words, numbers, and punctuation that make up a biblical reference is objectively confusing if you’re not used to it!
I initially addressed this issue by devoting a few minutes of the first day of each semester to going over how to parse a biblical citation. Recently, however, I’ve switched to a different approach: a handout, posted on the course website, featuring a color-coded visual guide to biblical citations by means of a complicated example from Genesis. This has several advantages over the in-class approach. First, it saves time on the always-busy first day of the semester. Second, it ensures that even students who transfer into a course later will have access to this crucial information. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it means that students can refer to it as needed throughout the semester. Our students are dealing with enough in terms of grasping these complex ideas and texts; the sheer task of figuring out what the readings are shouldn’t be an extra source of stress. My hope is that this graphic image for handouts eliminates that concern while also more effectively teaching this practical skill.
Ethan Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Villanova University.