Consciencebound

I love that the internet is full of so much information that 15 years ago, was only available to a very limited amount of people. This video is taken from academicearth.org which like The Teaching Company (teach12.com) has classes from prominent teachers and professors across the world that you can watch or listen to only academicearth.org is free. This video is of a class at Yale university which is an introduction to the Old Testament of the Bible. If you are interested in understanding more about the Bible as a literary book, this is a great video to watch. Some surprising things that you might learn is that the Old Testament is NOT:

1) The OT is NOT a Single Book with a single point of view but rather a collection of many different writings from divergent points of view that are often not in agreement.

2) The OT is NOT a pious tales about saints. They are full of real people who were good sometimes and horrible at other times. The humanness of the characters is evident through and through and some of the most famous are some of the worst in moral character.

3) The OT is NOT for children to read without parental editing. Yes, there are great narrative stories in the Old Testament, but many of those stories would be R rated if not NC-17 or X and care should be taken when letting children read it. Filter it as you would the internet.

4) The OT is NOT a theological text book but rather a series of varied literary genres which consist of narrative stories, histories, songs, poems, prophetic announcements.

5) The OT doesn’t claim to be authored by God, but is rather a collection of many different authors which was later compiled together into one volume.

Enjoy and take a look at some of the other videos at academicearth.org when you get a chance.

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