Genesis

This course—The Bible—has its origins in English 108 A, B, & C, The English Bible as Literature, a yearlong, 3-quarter class that I taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I served on the English faculty for over two decades. Most university classes with such a title focus mainly on material in the Bible that resembles a student’s other literary experiences, such as Job, the Psalms or the parables of Jesus. Such courses view the Bible as something akin to an anthology of ancient Near Eastern writings representing a variety of literary genres. From this perspective, the Bible is viewed as a book only because it is a collection of pages held together between two covers. Indeed, the word “bible,” ta biblia, means “the little books.”