Seminary 201: texts for my summer class

and a lazy way of interpreting the Bible

We are only a few weeks away from wrapping up my summer class, “Women in the Old Testament: Text and Context.” Summer is the craziest time to take classes. The work gets crammed into tiny corners, crowded and smothered by much more fun things. The class has been fine and my work has been fine and that’s all it’s been, fine. Next month, I’m going to have three weeks off and by the time fall quarter starts, we’ll be well into a fall routine. I’m glad because I’m taking Hebrew and a class on evangelism and I’ll need a routine to get through that work. 

For class, we read Jon D. Levenson’s Esther, a commentary in the series “The Old Testament Library.” It was fascinating and I learned quite a few things about Esther that I never knew, including the fact that the story in the Septuagint, or the Greek copy of the Hebrew Bible, is different than the story that we have in the Hebrew. If you have a “protestant” Bible, you have the Hebrew version. The Greek version should be in the Apocrypha and includes several additions.