Course Description
Building on the foundations from the Methodology Seminar, the general focus of this second seminar will be on developing the students’ skills in interpreting and critically-analyzing arguments within theological texts, in the pursuit of truth. Such endeavor will guide students in the art of logical demonstration (i.e., dialectic), wherein students will better develop their skills in locating, understanding, and articulating both sound and fallacious argumentation within the texts being studied. Such ways include (but are not limited to): (1) locating written and spoken terms and concepts that require definitional clarity; (2) locating contradictions and logical fallacies; (3) finding connections between different ideas that are of particular importance, and which serve as evidence and warrants in support of a claim; (4) discerning how the various sub-claims fit within the unifying coherence of the main claim; and (5) recognizing when an author is giving a mere opinion (which may be coincidentally true), or is speaking from a solid base of well-reasoned knowledge.
In particular, this seminar is introducing students to the book of Ruth within the Megillot of the Hebrew Bible; engaging primary texts in original languages; contextualizing the story and character of Ruth within the legal discourse of the Hebrew Bible; reflecting on implications of scribal practices from antiquity for conceptions of legal authority and development; deepening one’s understanding of how ancient Israelites navigated what it meant to be Israel in a range of political contexts.
Bibliography
SCHIPPER, JEREMY. Ruth: A New Translation With Introduction and Commentary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
LEVINSON, BERNARD. Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
BERMAN, JOSHUA A. “Ancient Hermeneutics and the Legal Structure of the Book of Ruth.” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 119 (2007): 22–38.
HINDY NAJMAN, “The Idea of Biblical Genre: From Discourse to Constellation,” in Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday (ed. Jeremy Penner, Ken M. Penner, and Cecilia Wassen; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 307–321.
NIELSEN, KIRSTEN. Ruth: A Commentary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.