Christian Sculptures Notes

Table of Contents

ECS Notes

25-38

Geography of Palestine

• 150 miles by 70 miles

• Crucial to understand the geography as it heavily influenced what happens in the texts. Unity amongst the whole country would be hard as the geography is so diverse. Different regions set the path for a lot of the texts to develop on their own as in the case of the Old Testament wherein the Mesopotania and Egypt lands were. The Exodus spends a lot of time in Egypt.

• By understanding the way that the ancient people lived, by way of understanding the geography that shaped their lives, we can better understand the texts they wrote.

• The Near East was full of religion and ritual where most cultures were polytheistic mainly.

• The coastal plain is in the south and narrows as it goes down.

  • Gaza and Ashdod are familiar biblical names in this area

• Central hill country

  • In the center of Palestine

  • Lots of hills

  • Far south leads to the Sinai Desert

• Jordan Rift

  • Begins near mount Hermon

  • Jordan River

• Transjordan Plateau

  • Bashan - todays Golan Heights known for cattle

Archaeology

• Important to understand the Meditterranian and Near East

• Find anything about the peoples way of life

• Not used to prove or disprove the bible, rather, it gives as much info as possible

• KEY FINDS

  • Rosetta stone

  • Ugaritic Materials

  • Mari Tablets

  • Dead Sea Scrolls

Primeval History

• Pentateuch is also the Old Testament and the first division in the Hebrew Canon

• 4 sections in order to understand the texts: Primeval History, Ancestral Stories, The Exodus, and Covenant

In The Beginning

The Garden of Eden

• Portrays god in anthropomorphic language and has a very different style to Genesis

• God creates the man AKA Adam from dust on the ground

• The search for community lead to the creation of a woman, the mother of all living things

• The start of Genesis has a weird connection with otyher narratives, specifically, the Babylonian epic from Mesopotania

  • The epic showcases a war between the gods and goddesses, with the Earth being shaped from the corpse of Tiamat

  • Parallels to Genesis 1

    • Begins with watery chaos

    • Order of creation is very similar except that in the Babylonian text, the parts of creation are tied to several gods and godesses.

• In order to understand Genesis in its fullest, we have to be able to understand to an extent the various historical and social settings of the era

• In Enuma Elish, the humans were slaves to trhe gods and godesses while in Genesis, they are of the creation of god

• Chapter 3 introduces the serpent whicvh tempts Eve into eating the fruit of the tree.

  • God lowkey crashes out and forces Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden to find their own world

• Genesis 1 and 2 provide two different accounts for the creation

  • Genesis 1 starts with a watery chaos that then becomes an ordered creation

  • Genesis 2 has land watered by a mist.

  • The shapers for the book of Genesis did not see this as a contradiction in narrative, but rather two different perspectives

Genesis 4-11

• Consider the types of literature in the text and how they relate.

  • Genesis 1-11 = primeval

  • Genesis 12-50 = ancestral

• Genesis 4 is about Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve.

  • Cain kills Abel when he is enraged about Abel’s sacrifice being accepted by god. This is associated with Sin

  • God confronts Cain and the retort from Cain, “Am I my brothers keeper?” is said

  • Cain was banished from the family and forced to be a fugitive and wanderer of the Earth

  • God provides a mark of protection for Cain

Genesis 6-9

• Evil has spread throughout humanity and taken the form of a flood

• Noah and his family are blessed by God and instructed to make an ark to hold representatives of every animal

• After the flood, God renews the creation with the promise that God will not again ‘destroy every living creature’

Genesis 11

• Tower of Babel.

• After the flood, humanity shares one language and they decide to build a city and tower to storm the heavens

• God crashes out again at the sight of their ambition and scatters people across the whole world and confusing their languages

Genesis analysis

• Each story from Genesis follows a pattern of disobedience against God, the consequences, and grace

38-50

Abraham and Sarah

• God summons the pair to go to Egypt because they were facing famine and Egypt had new promises

• Abraham tries to pass his wife off as his sister so the locals wouldn’t seek her

• Abraham becomes wealthy and uses said wealth to solve his problems.

• Abraham wants to have a child for two reasons:

  • 1: He was promised to have one

  • 2: Wants a child to prevent the lead house servant from obtaining the wealth

  • He engages in a strange ritual involing an animal cut in half with smoke passed between the halves to signal to God that is present. God pops up and says, “yo we gots to get you dat baby or you finna have to slice me yams in half like dis here animal yuh”

• Sarai was unable to have a child so she instructs the servant Hagar to have a child with Abram = Ishmael

• Weird af story

Isaac and Rebekah

• Transitions the story to a new generation

• Chapter 26 reaffirms the promise and blessing of progeny, land, and blessing

Jacob and Rachel

• These two are twins born from Isaac and Rebekah

• Rivalry between the two

• Jacob tricked Esau out of his birthright and blessing from his father

• Jacob flees to his Uncle to escape the murderous threat of his brother

• Jacob has a dream known as Jacobs ladder where God gtives the ancestral covenant promise to Jacob

• More deception happens and Jacob wants to marry his first cousin Rachel but is tricked into marryingf two of his first cousins

• Jacob and Rachel leave and Jacob has another encounter with the divine

  • His name is changed from Jacob, the trickster, to Israel

Joseph Generation

• God does not appear in the same way as before but rather as the natural processes of life

• He is seen as wise and able to interpret dreams as a way forward

• His brothers sell him into slavery and tell his father that an animal killed his son

• Joseph becomes a servant and is falsely accused of assaulting Potiphars wife

• Because he can interpret dreams, he is put in the Pharaohs court and he rises to be the prime minister of Egypt

• The promise still ends up alive in the end

Compiling the Pentateuch

• Composed over time from many different accounts

• The 17th century turned peoples brains on and they started to question the origins of these texts.

• Julius Wellhausen in 1878 hypothesized that the pentateuch came from several documents

• Potentially in the 10th century BCE a theologian told the stories of the pentateuch to tell Israels ancient origins

• Untrustworthy since so many peoples hands have touched and edited the texts

• 4 different types of Pentateuch

  • J (Yahwist) - Uses YHWH for god. Creation. Mount Sinai is where Mosaic covenant is concluded.

  • E (Elohist) - More abstract. Less picturesque than J.

  • D (Deuteronomist) - Relfects style and attitudes towards Josiahs reform. Only one central sanctuary is acceptable

  • P (Priestly) - Priestly concers, lawful, precise, censuses and geanealogies.

• A different approach to the pentateuch doesn’t care for the original texts and instead focuses on the final version.

  • Follows clues of canonical criticism

Exodus in context

Notes by topic

Canons Of The Bible 8/28/26

• Canon just means the books that are officially part of a religions specific bible

• A lot of variation of both the new and old testament

• Process of canonization is a process of scripturization

  • Some books take authority over another

CRITERIA for Canon

• Age - how old is it? Older books have a more immediate precidence

• Connected to authoritive figures

• Consistency of message - does align and convey the common messages found in other books

• Corroboration from other sources - Does it cite other books or reference other ones

Canonization of the Hebrew Bible - TaNaK

• Slow and somewhat obscure

• Council of Jamnia

• Some books were authoritative before others were

• Torah was the first authoritative scripture

  • Known and Pentateuch (5 books)

  • Genesis, exodus, leviticus, numbers, deuteronomy

• More text become more important known as the prophets - Nevi’im

  • Former prophets

  • Second most important book used to clarify the Torah

  • Latter prophets

• Final set of writings as authoritative scripture was the Ketuvim - Writings

• Order of what books are the most important

Torah - the most authoritative books

• Hebrew Bible organized as more so instructions that explain each other in a degree of authority

• Old testament is organized by genre

Old Testament

• Catholic old testament includes additonal writings not found in the protestant oldtestament

• Jews in Diaspora were losing their Hebrew tongue so they translated the books to Greek - AKA The Septuagint

  • They had 72 people translate the bible word for word to compare the books to ensure that they were the same

  • Broader selection of books that included books popular in the alexandria library

• Catholic old Testament follows the Sept. by using extra books not in the Hebrew bible

  • Second canon

• Protestant bibles which has extra books are in the back, hidden away, known as the Apocrypha

  • Protestant reformers wanted to skip past all the translations to select old text only originally written in Hebrew, not Greek which is where a lot of books in the Apocrypha are from.

The Canonization of the new testament 8/31/26

• The time frame for the writing and canonization is much smaller than the Hebrew scriptures, however the process was very similar

• Rather than one epicenter of authority, there were instead collections of books instead of one collection holding authority over the others to refer back to

• Ancient people probably only have a very limited amount of text

  • People in the area decided as a group which text would be kept and which are important based on the text they had available

    • Is it apostolitic, universal, or traditional?

The Bible says?…

• Which bible?

• Does it say that?

Tools, terms, and texts 8/31/26

• There are no autographs of the bible - no originals that they made

  • Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies . . .

  • The earliest fragments we have are still super old

  • All Biblical books contain variant readings

    • Translations and copies back in the day had the potentials to have real human error

    • Sometimes they have editorial changes motivated by theological concerns - Actual changes to the intention and literal things in the book

• Text critics are translators alike use the MASORETIC TEXT (MT) as the base text to reconstruct the old testament

  • Masoretes - The scribes were meticulous in order to make the texts they made as close to each other as possible

  • About 1,000 after Jesus died, which is 1,500 hundred years after the texts were originally written

• Dead Sea Scrolls - The scrolls found in a cave in the mid 20th century

  • All texts are basically incomplete

  • The texts demonstrate variant readings

• Older texts have more variant while newer ones are more aligned

Textual Criticism of the Old Testament

• Hebrew stopped being used by Jews so we use translations of the common language at the time

Textual Criticism of the New Testament

• Has WAYYYY more texts than the Old Testament written by hand.

• A lot more Christians than Jews in the ancient word

• Codices - more complete and generally later (4th - 5th centuries CE)

• Papyri - Usually fragmentary (2nd - 3rd centuries CE)

Translating the Bible

• Formal Correspondance

  • Word for word translation, maintaining the grammatical forms of each translated word.

  • Sometimes makes an issue that doesn’t make sense

• Dynamic Equivalence

  • Focuses on the meaning of the text and tries to recreate the meaning using contemporary language

For the exam 9/4/26

• Multiple choice questions (2 points): 20

• Short answer (5 points): 6

• Passage identification (5 points): 6

Notes by date

8/26/2026 - Syllabus Stuff

• Everything will be in the home tab in Canvas - no need to access other stuff

• Every test/exam is NON CUMULITIVE!!!

• Goals

  • Read the bible in a deeper understanding of the history, religion, ethics, and literature of the Old and New Testament

  • Learn to use different strategies to criticize the bible.

    • Formal citicism - What is the genre?

    • Informal criticism - Start from the premise that the Bible is an odd assortment of texts WHICH allows us to make better questions. You have to admit that parts of the bible are weird inherently

• Participation guidelines

  • Readings in BOLD vs NORMAL

    • Bolded readings are done BEFORE class

    • All information is on the exam and none is more important than another for the exam BUT bolded parts will be more focused on for the next class

  • How to find page in bible

    • Book name #: #-#

      • Go to the book name, chapter, verses EX: Exodus 3:1-6

• Reading Assignment

  • Engaging Christian Scriptures (ECS)

    • ONLY used for quizzes and none will be on exams

  • Biblical texts - 2-6 chapters, 5-10 additional chapters

    • relevant for exams and class discussions

    • Needs broad information for exams

• Assignments:

  • Entry/Exit Survey

    • Week 1 - A few basic questions about the bible

    • In the final full week of class, you will revisit the questions and update your answer based on your new knowledge

  • Weekly Critical Questions

    • Make one good question that would require thourough research

    • Can cover any part of the bible

    • NOT theological questions, questions focused on the text

    • Cite the text to prove question

    • Due each Friday by 5pm

    • 3 sentence minimum

  • Midrash

    • Essentially fanfiction

    • Solo or in groups

  • Exams happen in class

8/31/2026 - nvm