The Hebrew Bible is a diverse collection of writings produced during the first millennium BCE. This course is designed to familiarize students with this wide range of biblical literature and the literary culture that produced them. How do genres like biblical erotica, ritual, poetry, and prophecy complicate our assumptions about what is “biblical?” How did the biblical writers imagine acts of literary creation and creativity, divine revelation and human inspiration? The course is organized along three axes. 1. Bible as literature: what are the genres, conventions, and modes of discourse that give shape to biblical writings? Do ancient categories of writing differ from the ways we think of modern literature? 2. Bible as literary process: who were the anonymous authors that produced biblical writings? How did they learn to write, what are the tools they used, and what material traces of their handiwork did they leave behind? 3. The Bible as literary imagination: famously, God is said to have written the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets using his own finger. How might biblical writers have envisioned their own role in mediating and expanding divinely-revealed knowledge? Are there libraries and archives in heaven? What power or agency do texts have as material objects, and in what ways are they made meaningful through embodied enactment and performance. The course presumes no familiarity with the Hebrew Bible. All biblical texts will be read in translation. Examinations consist of short reflection papers, and the option of a term paper or creative/experimental project.