Introduction to the Old Testament: A Free Yale Course

Taught by Chris­tine Hayes, this Yale course offers an Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment, and cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

This course exam­ines the Old Tes­ta­ment (Hebrew Bible) as an expres­sion of the reli­gious life and thought of ancient Israel, and a foun­da­tion­al doc­u­ment of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. A wide range of method­olo­gies, includ­ing source crit­i­cism and the his­tor­i­cal-crit­i­cal school, tra­di­tion crit­i­cism, redac­tion crit­i­cism, and lit­er­ary and canon­i­cal approach­es are applied to the study and inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible. Spe­cial empha­sis is placed on the Bible against the back­drop of its his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al set­ting in the Ancient Near East.

You can watch the 24 lec­tures from the course above, or find them on YouTube. To get more infor­ma­tion on the course, includ­ing the syl­labus, vis­it this Yale web­site.

Texts used in this course include:

Berlin, Adele, and Marc Zvi Bret­tler, eds., Michael Fish­bane, senior con­sult­ing edi­tor. 2004. The Jew­ish Study Bible: Fea­tur­ing the Jew­ish Pub­li­ca­tion Soci­ety Tanakh Trans­la­tion. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Pritchard, James B, ed. 1958. The Ancient Near East, Vol­ume 1: An Anthol­o­gy of Texts and Pic­tures. Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. There you can find a spe­cial­ized list of Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es.

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