This page is designed to assist my students and any other students interested in the subject of Old Testament Survey or Old Testament Introduction. The subject is taught as an entry level religion course that browses through a distant foreign library of ancient scrolls that have had an immense impact on the development of our Western cultures. The writings of this ancient library, called the Tanakh by Jews, and the Old Testament by Christians, continue to inform our persepctives on spiritual, moral, social, intellectual, and political ideals. A culturally literate American needs some knowledge of the content and context of these writings that have come to be considered the "Holy Bible." The fascinating stories, personalities, and concepts contained in these antique writings are surprisingly relevant in our own supposedly sophisticated and advanced, but yet turbulent and challenging times. Also take a look at the Old Testament Annotated Bibliography page and the Course Schedule page.
This course should hopefully provide the students with
For the Fall Semester, 2002, the textbook for the course is John H. Tullock, The Old Testament Story. Sixth Edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002.
A separate page is available providing print and online resources for the study of Old Testament Survey. Visit the Annotated Bibliography page.
You can next view the Course Schedule which includes the Description of Writing Assignments required for the course.
Just as people once viewed planet earth as flat rather than round, so people may still view the Bible as flat. The sacred texts may be viewed as belonging only to the immediate present situation of the English reader with no reflection on the great expanse of time and geographical area involved in the writing of the documents that make up the Bible. The texts' past life, original authors, and cultural context seem irrelevant from a postmodern perspective. In this course we seek to recapture the three-dimensional aspects of the Old Testament. We will explore the temporal, geographical, social, and political contexts in which the Old Testament writings were composed and transmitted.
No part of the Bible was written originally in English. The Old Testament was written mostly in the Semitic (non-European) language of Hebrew, a form of Canaanite. Small sections were written in another Semitic language, Aramaic, which became the common political and economic language of the Middle East in the second half of the first millennium BCE. This was long before the development of the English language whose alphabet is taken from the Romans who borrowed and adapted theirs from the Greeks who borrowed and adapted theirs from the writing system used by the Hebrews and their neighbors (particularly the Phoenicians). The Levantine (Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, etc.) writing system was written from right to left. The Greeks and Romans eventually chose writing left to right instead, as we still do. The Levantine system did not represent the vowels explicitly in the writing in contrast to the choice of the Greeks and Romans to clearly indicate the vowels with their own symbols or characters.
In form, the Old Testament was really a library of separate documents written on about two dozen scrolls spread over three shelves. The composition took place before the invention of the book form (codex). Scrolls were usually about 10-12 inches high and became unwieldy if much longer than 30-35 feet when unrolled.
The original writers and readers of the Old Testament scrolls belonged to the cultural sphere of the Ancient Near East and were not Europeans.
You can find a few hints about writing style and a list of common writing errors to avoid at my help page on Good Composition.
Return to the Lecture Hall. Thanks for the visit! This page was edited on 23 August 2002. Email is welcomed by John R. Mitchell, Part-time Instructor in Religion. © 2000-2002 Erasmus Compositor, P.O. Box 25958, Baltimore, MD 21224. For an introduction to life at the center of the world forty centuries ago, visit an old Sumerian scribe at the Nippur Quay. You can also visit Villa Julie College.