Borns Jewish Studies Program

This course explores the diverse ethics about love and sex, economics, and violence expressed in the literature of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In each unit, we will read texts from a range of genres and contexts and will pose questions about how power and vulnerability are depicted in each case. We will ask: Who is protected and empowered in these texts? Who is forgotten? What anxieties and hopes might underlie these narratives and laws? How do we make sense of conflicting values depicted within and across these documents? Students will be asked to formulate answers to and debate (provisional) answers to these and other questions throughout the course as we grapple with the complex task of parsing, resisting, or welcoming ethical transformation by means of ancient text.