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Borgman, Distance Learning Course, Biblical Narrative, Parable, and Poetry
ED 536, Reading/Teaching The Bible As Literature: Major Narratives, Poetry, and Parable
Prof. Paul Borgman
An on-line course: three-hour credit, 28 sessions, offered through the Masters Program of Education of Gordon College—based entirely on assigned texts and web-centered distance learning, as described below. “Sessions” are daily assignments, running for five-plus weeks, from June 26 through August 18 (which allows for two weeks off--vacation). Each session requires from three to four hours.
I. BRIEF OVERVIEW
This course is designed for teachers in public venues. We will be exploring both how to read and how to teach the Bible as literature. The uniqueness of this on-line course lies in its step-by-step literary approach to major biblical works. These major texts include Genesis, Exodus, the David story, and Luke-Acts—along with their embedded poetry and parable. Each major narrative will be shown to have its own coherent and unified structure, and its own particular meanings.
Grading will be based primarily on journals posted on Blackboard, an on-line system allowing for “threaded discussion” Professors respond to students, and students to each other (as designated through the course). Journals consist of answers to assignment-by-assignment study questions, posted on Blackboard. Each student will explore the primary biblical text by way of these questions; the second layer of daily responsibility is to rehearse each of these answers by way of comparison with “answers” derived from the secondary texts (mostly the three Borgman books). This process is pedagogically informative, helping class participants to be thinking about their own lesson plans. Journals are worth 90% of the grade; students should be well apprised of how they’re doing as the course unfolds, since there are no exams and no major papers.
The student can choose to do two short essays or two teaching plans, or a combination. Each essay and/or teaching plan is worth 5%.
Our exploration encourages the reader to engage specific major texts by recognizing what is so different about ancient narrative from any modern conception of narrative, namely, that plot, character, and theme are governed not so much by an essentially linear development, but by interlocking patterns of repetition (“hearing clues”) that force the audience to be circling backwards while moving forward. My approach has been heartily endorsed by world-class scholars: Walter Brueggemann and Leland Ryken (Genesis, The Story We Haven’t Heard (2001); Terence Fretheim, Tremper Longman, and Everett Fox (“Who Is David?” Hearing the Whole Story (forthcoming); Joel B. Green and Robert Wall (The Way According to Luke: Hearing the Whole Story of Luke-Acts (2006). The preceding will be among the texts used for the course.
The student of this course will “graduate” not only with a fascinating sense of the individual dramatic shape and meaning of these various texts but with hands-on tools for teaching, like study-guide questions and power-point presentations.
II. TEXTS:
A. REQUIRED
1. An Annotated Study Bible (eg., the Oxford or Harper Study Bible, NRSV or NEB; the New
Jerusalem Study Bible)
2. Borgman, Paul Genesis, The Story We Haven’t Heard (IVPress, 2001);
3. ____________. “Who Is David?” Hearing the Whole Story (forthcoming);
4. ____________. The Way According to Luke: Hearing the Whole Story of Luke-Acts
(Eerdmans, 2006)
Note: All texts are available through Amazon.com; the David book will be supplied gratis, chapter by chapter, on-line through Blackboard.
B. SUGGESTED:
For each of our major narratives, I have placed on Blackboard many selected quotes by leading biblical scholars and literary critics, arranged both by author and by topic.
III. ASSIGNMENTS:
1. Sessions, 7 Genesis, with a glance at Exodus; including poetry
2. Sessions, 8 David (1 & 2 Samuel—1 Kings 1-2); including poetry, parable
3. Sessions, 13 Luke-Acts; including poetry, parable
Parables: form and meaning explored within respective narrative contexts
Poetry: form and meaning explored within respective narrative contexts
The course, by genre:
· major narrative -- the Big Picture of a given narrative by way of discovering and exploring the "hearing clues" within key repetitive, interlocking patterns.
· parable -- selected parables within their larger narrative context: eg., the Good Samaritan parable within the context of Luke 10:21-42, from (a) naive children to (b) "wise" adults--the lawyer, the religious authorities, and Martha—and to child-like adults, the good Samaritan and Mary;
· poetry -- selected and major poems (eg. Hannah’s poem, in “David”—and David’s own concluding poem which parallels that of Hannah; Mary’s “Magnificat” along with eleven other “preparatory poems” within the early chapters of Luke-Acts).
IV. OVERVIEW EXPANDED
As indicated by my titles of each volume of literary analysis (Genesis, David, Luke-Acts), we will be trying to "hear" this ancient literature by way of its oral storytelling techniques. “Hearing clues” are gathered as patterns that work often span large portions of narrative: without recognizing the patterns, we fail in ascertaining both narrative shape and meaning.
We miss the drama and meaning of these stories in large measure because we read them. The Bible’s original audience was mostly preliterate though highly skilled in listening. The text was written not for the private reader but for the public auditor—a text more like a dramatic script than anything resembling a modern narrative in print
This literary approach to biblical literature works with the assumption that the given forms of the texts as we have them—Genesis, Exodus, 1 & 2 Samuel, Luke-Acts—are coherent and unified dramas. As such, these works need to be examined for the synergy between the “how” and the “what”—the dynamic of the whole that determines the interconnection of all narrative, parabolic, and poetic parts. At the heart of the narrative dynamic are interlocking patterns of repetition: from repeated words through paralleled dramatic scenarios and including repeated themes that can span an entire story (most especially, the story of David).
Another example of our literary approach, this time with regard to poetry: only in recognizing the literary form of Hannah’s utterance at the beginning of David’s story will we be able to “hear” the paralleled poem of David that ends the story, revealing much of David’s mysterious character.
Coming to “hear” the literary voices of the Bible, rooted as they are in an oral-culture reality, is not an exercise in mastering aesthetic features, but a discovery that the "aesthetics"--the literary voice chosen--is the biblical writer’s means of expressing the implicit moral vision of the work, its truth. This is as surely the case with biblical literature as for any great literature of the world: from Homer through Shakespeare's dramatic scripts (both growing out of and directed back to an oral culture), up through the fiction of Saul Bellow, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the best of modern historical narrative.
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V. HOUSEKEEPING ISSUES
All graduate courses earn three semester hours of credit and 67.5 Professional Development Points (PDP). The rate is $990 for tuition plus a $50 administrative fee for a total of $1040. At this time, we are unable to offer a 'PDP-only' option, so all students enroll in the class for credit. They will receive full graduate credit as well as the PDPs. The method of registration is the same.
To enroll in the course, students simply need to fill out the registration form at the bottom of course offerings brochure and mail that along with a check to the graduate department. First time students also need to submit one official transcript confirming an undergraduate degree. Students in need of a registration form may drop by the office or request a form be mailed to them.
If you have any further questions:
Joyce Bell
Education Division Projects Coordinator
Gordon College
(978) 867-4315
(978) 867-4663 fax
V. A SAMPLE OF STUDY QUESTIONS: GENESIS
For each assignment/session, the student is responsible to respond in two parts:
(1) Answer the question based on your reading of the primary text (Genesis)
(2) Rehearse your answers, one by one, in the light of reading from the appropriate pages of Borgman’s texts (and any other, should you choose, from “Scholars’ Quotes,” Blackboard)
Notes: There are four narratives ("chapters") within Genesis--a whole story in its own narrative right. We will be selective with the extensive study questions that follow, as determined by student enrollment and preferences. In addition, we will pursue only the prologue-chapter and one other—perhaps assigning one "chapter" (Abraham) to one student and another "Joseph" to another. I include all possible study-questions for the students' own future personal and/or teaching goals.
--Genesis Narrative-Chapter 1. Genesis Prologue, chapters 1-11: Initial Patterns of Repetition
(a) Repetition of Creation Accounts (A. 1:1-2:4a; B. 2:4b-25)
1. What is the dramatic focus of each creation account? That is, what is the distinctive emphasis of each story? (Gen 1:1-2:25; Borgman, 26, 27)
2. What does each account of creation reveal, respectively,
(a) about the nature of God...what is God is like? (Note, carefully, the quite different portraits of God, respectively, including actual names, in the two accounts).
(b) about what is ideal for male and female relationship?
(c) about relationships to the animal world? (Gen 1:1-2:25; Borgman, 24-27)
3. Find and outline the poetic repetition in the six days of creation, account #1. (Gen 1:1-31; Borgman, 24)
4. God wants a suitable companion for the human being, and brings the animals. What is strange about this? What point might God be trying to make about ideal companionship? (Note: it is not "Adam" here, but rather ha-adam. “Adam” did not exist as a “he” or as "Adam" until after the gender differentiation scene in 2:21-23. The Hebrew “ha adam” is generally non-gender specific - a collective noun specifying neither male nor female. Had the writer wanted to specify male, this could easily have been done in the first place through the use of the Hebrew word, ish, for "man", as in 2:23). (Gen 2:18-25, Borgman, 25)
5. A summary question: what has the text accomplished by including two creation accounts, one after the other? (Gen 1:1-2:25; Borgman, 26, 27)
6. (a) There are three or four ideal relationships involving the human being. What are they?
(b) How does the wrongdoing and consequence that follows accentuate these main harmonies intended by the Creator? (Gen 3:1-19; Borgman, 27-30)
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(b) Repetition of Characters With the Same Tragic Flaw
7. Eve: What is the root of Eve’s wrongdoing--what finally tempts her? (Try to avoid “pride” or “disobedience” as an answer. Rather, explore the question in terms of the story’s own language and imagery.) (Gen 3:1-7; Borgman, 28-30)
8. How does the serpent draw Eve into a word game that eventually causes her to disobey God? (Gen 3:1-7; Borgman, 28, 29)
9. Cain: (a) Do we know for sure why God did not favor Cain’s gift? How important to Cain's story is any possible answer to this question? (Remember to look only in the text for your answer, rather than a commentator's guess or your own assumptions.)
(b) So what is the story's focus? (Gen 4:1-16; Borgman, 31)
10. Where does the drama lie in the story of Cain and Abel? How do God’s words to Cain in 4:6,7 enable us to understand the story’s focus? (Gen 4:1-16, Borgman, 31, 32)
11. How is God’s punishment of Cain fitting for Cain’s motives for wrongdoing? (Gen 4:10-16; Borgman, 33)
12. How is Cain's dilemma connected to what lies at the root of Eve’s wrongdoing? (Gen 4:1-16; Borgman, 33)
13. Lamech: How does this brief mention function within the larger theme/themes of the prologue? (Gen 4:19-24; Borgman, 34)
15. In Lamech’s call to his wives, who is the main subject in each line? (Gen 4:23, 24; Borgman, 34)
16. How does Lamech’s threat of vengeance compare to the similar threat made by God about Cain? What does this reveal about Lamech? (Gen 4:15; Borgman, 34)
17. Noah: There is a formula blessing about “multiplying” given by God to both Adam and Eve and then to Noah and family. What differs in the repetition, and how does this “twist” accentuate where the prologue is heading, dramatically? That is, would this be a positive or negative development? (Gen 1:28-30, 9:1-7; Borgman, 35, 36)
18. How does God’s responses to human choice differ and change throughout the prologue? From Cain’s story to Noah’s? From Noah to Babel? (Gen 1-11; Borgman, 35)
19. Babel: How does Babel's "problem" connect up with the problems of Eve and Adam, Cain, and then Lamech? (Gen 11:1-9; Borgman, 36)
20. How does this vignette (11:1-9) appropriately conclude the prologue? (Gen 11:1-9; Borgman, 36,37)
21. What is cleverly appropriate about God’s scattering of the peoples (Recall Gen 1:28)? What does this possibly suggest about God’s attitude, at this point, towards humanity? (Gen 11:6-9; Borgman, 37, 38)
22. How is God’s punishment for the Babel builders fitting for the crime? (Gen 11:6-9; Borgman, 37)
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--Genesis Narrative-Chapter 2. Abraham and Sarah
(a) Ordinary Choices of the Worst Sort: Repeated Scenarios
I. Abraham & Sarah (Instance A. 12:10-20; Instance B. 20:1-21:2)
II. Abraham & Sarah--& Hagar (Instance A. 16:1-15; 21:9-21; instance B. 25:12-18)
(a). Abraham and Sarah: Risking Sarah's Chastity Twice (A. 12:10-20; B. 20:1-21:2)
1. Find the parallels between the two episodes of Abraham risking his wife's chastity; locate differences in the second instance, and suggest the significance of these differences. (Borgman, 47-51)
2. In each episode’s conclusion, how does Abraham’s role correlate to God’s initial challenge and promise to Abraham? (Gen 12:1-3; Borgman, 42, 50)
3. In these two episodes, what role does Sarah play? How does Sarah’s relating to Abraham connect to the curse put on the first married couple we encountered in Genesis (3:16)? (Borgman, 43)
4. Compare Abraham’s treatment of Sarah in these episodes to her treatment by God and Abimelech (Remember, in that culture, that a woman’s significance is determined by her childbearing). (Borgman, 48)
5. Note that the second of these episodes ends in chapter 21 (there were no chapter or verse markings in the original manuscripts). There is a flashback--delayed information--which contributes to the sense of the episode's conclusion into the 21st chapter. Cite the flashback (toward the very end of ch.20) and state what is accomplished by this delay of information. (Gen 20:1-21:2; Borgman, 49)
6. How might it be that the episode finds its true climax in the opening of Sarah's womb? (Gen 20:1-21:2; Borgman, 49)