Maybe you went to Yale. Maybe you didn't. Well, you can determine for yourself whether the Ivy League education is all it's cracked up to be because Yale is now offering a select number of courses for free via teh interwebs in its new program Open Yale Courses.
This is not entirely new as Harvard and MIT and a few other universities have similar programs making their undergrad curricula available to the general public. Harvard's Helmut Koester has been rocking the house for years!
RLST 145 - Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) is taught by Professor Christine Hayes, Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica.
The course is described as such:
This course examines the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) as an expression of the religious life and thought of ancient Israel, and a foundational document of Western civilization. A wide range of methodologies, including source criticism and the historical-critical school, tradition criticism, redaction criticism, and literary and canonical approaches are applied to the study and interpretation of the Bible. Special emphasis is placed on the Bible against the backdrop of its historical and cultural setting in the Ancient Near East.
Through the course webpage, you can download transcripts, listen to mp3s and even watch video of the lectures. (I wish I had this when *I* was in school!)
Professor Hayes received her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1993. A specialist in talmudic-midrashic studies, Hayes offers courses on the literature and history of the biblical and talmudic periods. She is the author of two scholarly books: Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, recipient of the 1997 Salo Baron prize for a first book in Jewish thought and literature, and Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud, a 2003 National Jewish Book Award finalist. She has also authored an undergraduate textbook and several journal articles.
If anyone else knows of interesting online university courses that are worth making known, please... erm... let me know!
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