{"id":610,"date":"2008-01-20T20:14:51","date_gmt":"2008-01-21T02:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2008\/01\/20\/torah-and-former-prophets-intro\/"},"modified":"2008-01-20T20:14:51","modified_gmt":"2008-01-21T02:14:51","slug":"torah-and-former-prophets-intro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/20\/torah-and-former-prophets-intro\/","title":{"rendered":"Torah and Former Prophets: Intro"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not really sure how much I&#8217;ll be able to post about my classes as the semester goes (it&#8217;s the first week and I&#8217;m already feeling the pressure), but I&#8217;ve set aside 20 minutes tonight to mention my second class of the semester.&nbsp; It is a Seminar in the Torah and Former Prophets (Genesis-2 Kings, except Ruth), which is a lot of material.<\/p>\n<p>The requirements for the course:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Read the biblical text three times\n<li>Read 750 pages from scholarly commentaries\n<li>Read 15 recent journal articles and write summaries\n<li>Write a research paper and present it to the class\n<li>Prepare a response to another research paper and present it to the class\n<li>Write the <a href=\"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/2008\/01\/17\/how-forests-are-wiped-out\/\">Bible argument<\/a> for Genesis<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Added together, there&#8217;s a lot of work here.&nbsp; I think it&#8217;s on the medium side of the difficulty scale in this program.&nbsp; I am planning to write my research paper on the reign of Jehu, with the intention of developing this into a dissertation.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the class session was a lecture by the professor, but many future sessions will be seminar papers.&nbsp; Here are a few things he said (I&#8217;m just reporting, not necessarily agreeing):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Genesis chapter 1 ends at 2:3 (or 2:4).&nbsp; This chapter division was the work of a drunk monk.&nbsp; (You can see that the ancient scribes agreed by the presence of a samekh in the margin).\n<li>There are half a dozen Creation texts in the Bible.&nbsp; Only the emphasis by the creation research people has given Genesis 1 the seeming singularity.&nbsp; A biblical theology of creation that stays only in Genesis 1 is not a successful biblical theology of creation.\n<li>When the professor was a student, <em>The Genesis Flood<\/em>, by Whitcomb and Morris was a new text.&nbsp; Imagine a textbook in science that is 40 years old and never had a revision, you wouldn&#8217;t dare use this in a class today.&nbsp; But today you can buy the same book in leather binding with a gold ribbon.\n<li>The missions department at DTS sees world missions as a reversal of the Tower of Babel, bringing people back to faith who were disseminated.\n<li>The Bible doesn&#8217;t say that God cursed man and woman at the Fall, though all preachers say this.&nbsp; It says that the effects of the curse on the serpent extend to the woman, and the effects of the curse on the ground extend to the man.\n<li>Beitzel&#8217;s view of a northern Ur is to be preferred to the traditional view of a southern Ur.\n<li>Popular Christian mythology found in all liberal books is that Abraham was a nomad.&nbsp; But he was a sophisticated urbanite.&nbsp; It would have been a little thing for God to tell him to move if he was a nomad.&nbsp; Abraham was not a nomad; that guts the story.&nbsp; No, he became semi-nomadic because of the call of God.\n<li>The Great Commission of the Bible is Genesis 12:3 (Matt 28:18-20 is just a recasting).\n<li>The ability of a 89-year-old woman to conceive required a greater miracle than just &#8220;giving her an egg.&#8221;&nbsp; God had to completely rebuild Sarah&#8217;s anatomy.\n<li>We make far too much of Joseph and far too little of Judah.&nbsp; Joseph is a flat character; Judah is the colorful one as he goes through the character change.\n<li>You must read &#8220;How to Read the Bible as Literature,&#8221; by Leland Ryken.\n<li>The story of Judah in Genesis 38 shows what would have happened to the sons of Jacob had they stayed in the land and not gone to Egypt. But by going to Egypt, where Semites were viewed as detestable, there was no intermarriage and thus the integrity of the nation was preserved.\n<li>Joseph&#8217;s fleeing of immorality should take our breath away.&nbsp; Here is a person who from all apparent evidence is destined to an ignominious death in a foreign land, never to see his family again, never to have contact with people of faith again, and this woman is constantly enticing him.\n<li>Focus on the number of times it says of Joseph that &#8220;Yahweh was with him.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ok, that&#8217;s more than I expected to write, but that&#8217;s your window into a doctoral course.&nbsp; Next week the class will focus on Creation issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not really sure how much I&#8217;ll be able to post about my classes as the semester goes (it&#8217;s the first week and I&#8217;m already feeling the pressure), but I&#8217;ve set aside 20 minutes tonight to mention my second class of the semester.&nbsp; It is a Seminar in the Torah and Former Prophets (Genesis-2 Kings,\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/20\/torah-and-former-prophets-intro\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-israel","category-phd-coursework"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}