The Fables of Aesop is out now!
The Literary World of the Hebrew Bible: Teaching Biblical Literature as Literature

by

Justin Jackson

$3.00

Presented at the CiRCE National Conference 2022.

In this breakout, Dr. Jackson will discuss how to approach the literary qualities of the Hebrew Bible on its own terms: not strictly as a Christian text, not as comparative mythology, not as an history, not simply as genre studies. What literary devices do our authors use to communicate the religious narrative for a religious community, a narrative developed over millennia, and how do we begin to teach this text in our various educational locales—classical charter schools, private Christian schools, homeschool. There are all sorts of difficulties that the teacher must be prepared for: church/state issues obviously; multi-denominational students; checking our own theological baggage. The Hebrew Bible offers its readers (believers and atheists alike) masterful narratives and poetry, and it’s a crime that we don’t teach its formal literary qualities more readily in the US—despite the various difficulties we’ll encounter.