Undergraduate Courses

The Hebrew Bible is among the most famous texts of the ancient world. This familiarity can be an advantage when seeking to capture the interests of undergraduates, but it also raises complex pedagogic challenges. Religious and cultural sensitivity is paramount when introducing students to the critical study of the Bible as an historical source of the ancient Near East. The classroom environment must encourage open dialogue and respectful exchange between students who approach the Bible with reverence and those students who wish to destabilize the text and question its enduring influence. Students who have limited experience with the Bible, or who may even be encountering this text for the very first time, must also be made to feel welcome and empowered to engage in peer discussion.

My primary ambition as a teacher is to encourage students to engage directly with the biblical text and read it with fresh eyes, so as to appreciate its rich complexity as a literary work produced over centuries, and in a very different cultural world to our own. In so doing, I hope to expose students both to the core methodologies that inform biblical studies, while also developing cross-disciplinary understanding and transferable skills such as critical thinking, text-analysis and evaluation of evidence, and open and respectful exchange with peers. Moreover, I also seek to introduce students to Near Eastern and material evidence (archaeological, iconographic, etc.) with which to compare to the biblical materials, so as to help students critically assess their value as historical sources. My aim is to give students the confidence to work as a class to push beyond their preconceptions, to practice the skill of integrating diverse (and often contradictory!) evidence, and to savor the thrill of reconstructing a foreign world of the distant past. To help bring the past alive, I frequently draw on the collections of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, and also the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, so as to provide a tangible anchor to the regions and time periods that are mentioned in the sources. I also facilitate other creative ways of engaging with written sources of the Near Eastern past, such as cooking the world's oldest recipes from the Yale Babylonian Collection at the Maxwell Dworkin Science and Cooking Lab.

Below are the details of three undergraduate courses that I have taught at Harvard University. A representative syllabus of a course I designed and taught is also available.