This course will survey the literary and cultural heritage of the modern West, considering ancient, late antique, and medieval writings that have had a formative and enduring influence on our culture. Readings will include Ancient Near Eastern texts, classical Greek literature, and selections from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament as well as other Jewish and Christian books. Although we will discuss the historical influence, timeless themes, and abiding value of these writings, we will focus on their exegesis: on pursuing the close readings of these texts on their own terms and in their own contexts. Accordingly, special attention will be given to the cultural history of the period. By investigating the social and historical contexts that shaped each of these writings, we will ask how Western culture was forged in the encounters (due to war and imperial expansion, no less than trade and intellectual exchange) between different peoples, religions, and nations in the regions of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

The course will explore two main themes. The readings for the first semester revolve around the quest to understand the human condition in relation to the natural world, on the one hand, and the supernatural world, on the other. We shall see how Sumerians, Israelites/Jews, Greeks, and Christians penned myths about human beginnings, tales of human history, and treatises about human potential and, in the process, offered different answers to shared questions about humanity’s unique place among, between, and/or beyond the animal and the divine.

In the second semester, we will turn from the aetiology of the human to the construction of collective identities: political, ethnic, cultural, and religious. We will begin with Babylonian, Israelite, and Greek tales about the origins of cities and nations and about the institutions of kingship, society, and law. By means of Jewish and Christian literature, we will then turn to examine the historical processes by which the concept of religious identity came to constituted as distinct from concepts of national, cultural, and ethnic identity. At the same time, we will ask how specific religious identities took form in interaction with one another and with the broader cultural contexts that they shared.