Harvard Presents Two Free Online Courses on the Old Testament

A quick note: Shaye J.D. Cohen, a pro­fes­sor of Hebrew Lit­er­a­ture and Phi­los­o­phy at Har­vard, has just released his sec­ond free course on iTunes. The first course was called The Hebrew Scrip­tures in Judaism & Chris­tian­i­ty. The new one, sim­ply titled The Hebrew Bible, “sur­veys the major books and ideas of the Hebrew Bible (also called the Old Tes­ta­ment) exam­in­ing the his­tor­i­cal con­text in which the texts emerged and were redact­ed. A major sub­text of the course is the dis­tinc­tion between how the Bible was read by ancient inter­preters (whose inter­pre­ta­tions became the basis for many icon­ic lit­er­ary and artis­tic works of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion) and how it is approached by mod­ern bible schol­ar­ship.” The new course, fea­tur­ing 25 sets of video lec­tures and lec­ture notes, has been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es, a sub­sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 1,300 Free Online Cours­es. Oth­er relat­ed cours­es worth explor­ing are Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment and Intro­duc­tion to New Tes­ta­ment His­to­ry and Lit­er­a­ture, both from Yale.

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