Overview
Mondays, October 12 - November 16,
5:30-7pm ET
Thank you for your interest in this program. At this time, we have a wait list for new registrants.
If you would like to sign up for the wait list, click here: Join Waitlist
Waitlisted registrants will be contacted in the order they registered if space becomes available. *Please fill out a form for each person you want to add to the list.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Book of Job is a God-saturated oeuvre, and its hero, is a God-intoxicated man. While there occur periodic confrontations between human and divine throughout the Hebrew Bible, no other confrontation is so pronounced and sustained as the one with which the book begins— Satan playing on God’s suspicion that his “servant” Job does not really love him. Job can in fact be read as a sado-masochistic love story, a Biblical version of The Story of O.
But it is also quite readable as a book about innocence, integrity, and single-minded devotion, and about terrible, inexplicable suffering, persistence and courage, and about the complexity of intimacy especially within marriage, about loneliness, abandonment and friendship, and about God as a creative, improvisational genius, who is generous, impractical and at times truly dangerous.
These are the themes this class will explore through a wide range of readings including works by Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Nina Callard, Claire Carlisle, Ellen Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Yaffa Eliach, Edward Greenstein, Davis Hankins, Lewis Hyde, Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard, Mark Laramore, Emannuel Levinas, Jack Miles, Stephen Mitchell, Philip Roth, Richard Sewall, Raymond Scheindlin, Elie Wiesel, Christian Wiman.
Specifically:
Stephen Mitchell, trans., The Book of Job as translated by Archibald MacLeish, J.B. A Play in Verse
Ellen Davis, “Job and Jacob: The Integrity of Faith” from Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible, 1992.
Elie Wiesel, “Job: Our Contemporary” from Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, 1976
Mark Laramore, from his The Book of Job: A Biography, 2013, “Introduction,” Chapter 5, “Job in Exile” and “Conclusion”
Jack Miles, from his God: A Biography, 1995, Chapter 10, “Confrontation”
Carol Newsom, final chapter from her The Book of Job: A contest of Moral Imaginations, 2003, “The Voice from the Whirlwind: The tragic Sublime and the Limits of Dialogue”
COURSE FORMAT
This is an interactive online seminar course that meets weekly over 6 weeks. Live online sessions will use the zoom platform. Weekly reading or other forms of materials may be assigned. Weekly sessions will be recorded and available for registered participants to access throughout the course.
There are no papers or grades. This course does not offer any credits or certificates. This course is intended for learning for the love of learning.
COURSE MATERIALS
This course will have all reading materials supplied by the instructor in .pdf form.
Registrants will receive access to the course website and the zoom links about two weeks before the course starts.
COURSE CANCELLATION POLICY
Registrants can cancel and receive a full refund up to September 25. After September 25, there will be no refunds issued. Yale Alumni College courses are subject to schedule changes as well as cancellations. If Yale Alumni College must cancel any course prior to its start due to low enrollment, you will be notified of this by the cancellation date. Upon cancellation of a course, registrants may transfer their registration to another available course or have the registration fee fully refunded.
In the event of a disruption to the original course schedule, including but not limited to; Professor absence, hazardous weather conditions, or local travel restrictions, Yale Alumni College will do its best to reschedule the missed class for the week immediately following the original end date at the same course time and day.