Full Reverse! The OT/HB from Writings to Torah

“Say, I know! Let’s teach our students, at term’s beginning, a model of Pentateuch formation that requires many of them to make a major emotional adjustment, and further involves learning the ENTIRE TIME LINE AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY of a thousand years of ancient Israel! Because, pedagogically speaking, how could that go wrong?”

JEDP as a starting point for Old Testament study: what have we been thinking?

But I admit, that’s not the real reason that I began to teach the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT/HB) “in reverse” (beginning with the Writings, then Latter Prophets, then Former Prophets, then Pentateuch). It began with my impatience concerning the (entirely understandable) flatness of introductory students’ readings of narratives in the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets. The presuppositions animating these learners’ poor readings have included:

• that biblical texts will agree with one another: theologically, ethically, historically;
• that “God’s” character in the Bible will agree substantively with that of the “God” they experience in their larger life of faith, or with the “God” of Western Christianity broadly conceived;
• that a biblical text aims to depict God as morally right and self-evidently justified in God’s actions;
• that human characters in the Bible can be divided into the good (faithful, wise) and the bad (faithless, foolish)…and that the purpose of most biblical texts is to make such clean distinctions, presumably for “our” moral instruction.

I would often say to my Teaching Assistant after class, “If only they had already dealt with the Writings: open complaint against God, stark acknowledgement of unaddressed injustice, fundamental intertextual disagreements! These would so change their expectations about what ‘the Bible’ is, when they sit down to read about the creation, or Abraham and Hagar, or poor Adonijah, or Ahab and Micaiah.”

So, in Fall 2009, I pulled the trigger. I taught the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible “in reverse” for several semesters, breaking the course into four learning units: “Writings” > “Latter Prophets” > “Former Prophets” > “Pentateuch.”

Benefits of teaching the OT/HB “in reverse”:

How has this all turned out in practice? The benefits have included:

Tackling literary criticism (largely) before historical criticism: Norman Petersen argues persuasively in “Literary Criticism in Biblical Studies” (Orientation by Disorientation, ed. R.A. Spencer, 1980) that it’s better to begin with questions leading back into the details of the text (e.g., form, content, rhetoric) before going on to questions leading outside of the text (e.g., historical setting, institutional function, authorship). The Writings require less than the rest of the OT/HB in the way of “historical criticism,” and fit more easily into student preconceptions about “literary criticism.”

Immediate exposure to “testimony and counter-testimony”: It’s not hard, in the Writings, to show Walter Brueggemann’s “texts of testimony and of counter-testimony” as an essential feature of the OT/HB: complaint psalms v. praise hymns; Job v. Proverbs; Daniel’s apocalypses v. court legends. This paves the way toward the more subtly-distinguished perspectives among the Latter Prophets, or between the Chronicler and Samuel-Kings, or the Priestly writers and Deuteronomists.

Manageable, staged learning of the time line and political geography: For the Writings, you only really need 586-539 (Babylonian Exile) and 167-164 (Antiochus Epiphanes). This raises questions about the years preceding Exile, to be examined during the Latter Prophets, taking us back to 722 and 701 (fall of Samaria, Assyrian attempt at Jerusalem). The Former Prophets complete the journey back to 12th century (Israel’s “emergence” in the land followed by United Monarchy and Divided Monarchy). NOW–finally–we’re in a position to use what we’ve already learned in order to address the composition history of the Pentateuch.

“Prophets Precede Pentateuch“: Wellhausen’s initial insight, leading to his Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP), was that the Prophets did not have the Pentateuch (“the Law”). Reading the Prophets before the Pentateuch models this, fundamentally changing one’s perception of both Prophets and Pentateuch.

Practical requirements:

What have turned out to be the practical demands of a “reversed” approach?

A textbook lending itself to a largely canonical arrangement of units: Bernard Anderson’s largely historical and thematic arrangement doesn’t work well for my purposes. Coogan is possible but challenging, with his generally chronological approach. Barry Bandstra, Christopher Stanley, and Rolf Rendtorff all lend themselves to “canonical clumping.”

A textbook with a substantive, stand-alone introductory section: Since we read the textbook “out of order,” it’s important that it begin with a lengthy, discrete introduction providing a foundation for all that follows, not just the first unit. If the textbook relies upon each chapter to provide scaffolding for the next, it probably won’t work well. I like Stanley here.

A textbook that is well indexed: Again, since we’re reading “out of order,” the textbook needs a good index, for those times when we read (in Chapter 11, say) a term first introduced and defined in (say) Chapter 4.

Transparency with the learners about the approach: No student will overlook that we’re doing something a bit odd here. So, I try to communicate openly with students about what we’re doing, and some of the reasons why. It can be tricky to open a conversation about “pedagogy” with a nervous, self-doubting, process-doubting, largely captive group of subjects. Every aspect of the course can become a trigger for a student’s fear of failure (“But I’m this kind of learner! But I’m that kind of learner! I’m an ISFJ/Introvert/Logical/Pisces! So I won’t succeed this way!”). Short, declarative statements about our plan seem to work well.

Reflection

Of course, this is all simply about finding out what learners need to know in order to learn what we need them to know. Without meaning to take Donald Rumsfeld as a paragon of pedagogy, it’s about doing what’s needed to “go to class with the learners we have” instead of hypothetical learners with more convenient (to us) competencies.

What, for you, is not working in teaching your field? What, for you, might be so crazy that it just might work?

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