1 Introduction

The comparatist work I use in this upper-level undergraduate class accomplishes a variety of goals related to individual academic journey as well as institutional requirements for English Majors, Diversity Electives, and University General Education. For the individual academic journey, the semester provides a means to increase familiarity with the three founding works of the Abrahamic religions. Students report that while their experience with these texts draws from a multiplicity of sources, including sermons, family, films, and social media, few have studied the texts as texts. Often, students find the texts exclusionary and/or judgmental. They want to know the relevance of these texts to their lives.

By studying the texts with strategies that help reveal the great diversity of meaning-production shared by all three works, students discover the porous nature of these texts. Students find that they can often see themselves in some of the characters, stories, and values that the texts communicate. Or, to the contrary, thanks to our robust classroom discussions and enrichment readings, students recognize and express their disagreement. Ideas that the students may have harbored about the texts as critical readers and thinkers can be validated and/or complicated. The pedagogical strategy is to democratize not only the dynamics within the classroom but also the reception of the texts themselves.

For the institution, the strategies outlined below validate the importance of building a civil society through education and discourse. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas has often been cited as one of the most, if not the most, diverse campuses in the United States. As a result, we have had the great honor and opportunity to develop arenas to support one another in all our diversity through a variety of programming. Recruitment efforts are inclusive, enhancing our student body diversity. Academic programming supports an ethos of equity. Cultural, educational, and social programming, as well as community engagement, highlight the richness of diversity.

Along with this vision, this course (Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature) provides a fresh medium for approaching not only literatures from different time periods, global geographies, and diverse cultures. It also provides a medium for an introduction to the three Abrahamic religions, to the peoples affected by and affecting these religions, and to the recognition of the diversity within each religion. Oliver Freiberger (Forthcoming), in his article for this issue, argues for much the same function of a comparative approach to religion. “The fact that de-provincializing is inherently comparative indicates how fundamental the comparative method is,” he writes. Cultural competency that includes an education about the diversity of religious expression is key to our democratic project.

What follows is an explanation of the comparative strategy I have employed in the design of this course. This strategy includes three essential components: defamiliarization, literary theory, and democratization.

2 Defamiliarization

The class does not begin with the stories and biblical characters or values that students may know. In the spirit of Bertolt Brecht (1957), the starting goal is defamiliarizing the familiar material to encourage critical thinking. And, in a similar spirit, as Walter Benjamin (1969 [1935]) would advise, the starting goal is to also remove the aura of these texts, or deauratisize these artifacts and offer them to students for critical study. The strategies described below help students see these three Abrahamic works afresh as literary works.

The class begins with archeological images showing the representation of the mother goddess in paleolithic and neolithic artifacts. Introducing these artifacts and images reminds students of the universality of human instincts: sexuality, spirituality, and survival. Also, archeological images of burial sites and wall paintings remind students that finding meaning in life and death is central to all humanity. Showing artifacts, often called idols, of the full-bodied images of the mother goddess resonates with students. These images of the woman goddess are not of the slim, weakened, or victimized woman often appearing in popular media. Rather, these images reveal full breasts, thighs, stomachs, and legs. The legs are often spread open either in a seated position or standing and often show signs of giving birth. In addition to validating the power of the mother goddess and, by extension, of women and the feminine, the images remind students of the primal forces that the three texts shape through their stories, characters, and values.

The introduction of the mother goddess early in the semester also reminds students that, just because these three texts are largely patriarchal, the power of women and the feminine exists within them. It is the first step toward a strategy of inclusivity that resists the exclusionary dimensions of these texts.

3 Literary Theory

Textual themes ripe for comparative work drive text my selection. While lectures are brief, they include the historical dimensions of canonization and text developments. They also introduce several key literary strategies—figural, thematic, and cultural¹—to help students recognize the multiplicity of meanings that the texts produce.

The figural strategies of typology (Alter 1978) and the fourfold figurative reading (Frye 1957) invite and encourage classroom discussion. Often associated exclusively with Christian interpreters, typological and fourfold figurative interpretation has been a tradition shared by interpreters of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Typological interpretation aims to find thematic similarities in characters and episodes. The fourfold strategy recognizes multiple layers of meaning-production in a text: literal (metonymic/synecdoche), allegorical (metaphor, simile), moral (tropological), and spiritual (anagogical). Contemporary interpreters also use these strategies to make cultural connections and demonstrate influence.

For figural complexity, thematic richness, and cultural resonances within the Hebrew Bible, I select books with compelling character and narrative developments: Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Song of Songs, Job, Isaiah 1–7, and Daniel. The characters, episodes, and values herein set a rich foundation for providing themes that extend into subsequent discussion of the New Testament and Qur'an and of cultural patterns. I introduce the Hebrew Bible with a survey that extends from the earliest oral period, including the artifacts that confirm the existence of an Israelite people, to the time of canonization. I also select thought-provoking articles to provide a journey of discovery. Related to cultural connections, students discover the power of episodes involving women. They discover the conflict between pastoral and city life, jealousy among siblings, and transactional humanity. They discover a sometimes-arbitrary divine power, one both cruel and compassionate. They discover that disobedience to divine decree, not sin, triggers divine punishment. And they discover the human advocate archetype, whether Eve, Abraham, or Moses, who opposes divine decree to support their human peers.

The Book of Daniel's apocalyptic message forms a bridge to the New Testament, demonstrating the historicity of the apocalyptic phenomenon that permeates both the New Testament and Qur'an, reflecting both thematic and cultural relevance. In the New Testament, we focus on the four Gospels and Paul's Letter to the Romans. The introduction of the New Testament begins with a history lesson about the occupation of the Levant by the Roman Empire and its crushing, autocratic rule. The lesson includes Jewish civil unrest, rebels fighting against the Romans, and a priesthood understood as, on the one hand, trying to keep the peace and, on the other, complicit with Roman repressive rule. The introduction includes the destruction of the Second Temple, 70 ce, and the crushing of the final Jewish rebellion in 135 ce during which time nascent Christianity began its separation from Judaism. Complex portraits of women, diverse sexualities, eroticism, and marriage all raise questions about equity and hegemony. Battles between the early followers of Jesus and their Jewish interlocutors resemble the sibling hatred and rivalry portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. The growing emphasis away from earthly life and toward the afterlife suggests a polemic shift from the Hebrew Bible.

The introduction of the Qur'an begins with a history lesson about the dispersal of the Jews from Judah after 70 ce, early Christians escaping Roman persecution, the eventual Christianization of the Roman Empire, and the ultimate fall of the Western Roman Empire. Jews and Christians alike spread into the Arabian desert, the crossroads of great trade routes between west and east. Here, in a vast populated land largely unaffected by direct Roman and later Byzantine rule, developed early Islam and the Qur'an. Selected suras include themes from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Suras establish an ethical roadmap for the early Muslim community and beyond. Sura 1 (the Opening) contains the prayer to the one deity. Sura 2 (The Cow) introduces Satan, the afterlife, charity, and free will. Suras reference characters and episodes within the other two texts of the Garden of Eden, Joseph of Egypt, and the Virgin Mary as mother of Jesus. The text emphasizes the humanity of Jesus as an earthly, not divine, messiah. Other suras, including 3 (The House of Imram), 4 (Women), 7 (the Heights), 10 (Jonah), 12 (Joseph), 17 (The Journey), 19 (Mary), 20 (the Beneficent), 53 (the Star), 72 (The Jinn), 75 (The Resurrection), 78 (The News), and 112 (Devotion: The Oneness of God), trace the ethical development of the early, growing Muslim community.

4 Democratization

Students leading and participating in conversations and controversial-topic discussions democratize classroom dynamics. From the moment I first taught the class, I decided that I did not want to be the professor who lectured. I wanted students themselves to present the radical diversity of ways to interpret these texts. Thus, each student summarizes and presents one article a semester and leads class discussion. Students often divide into small groups to summarize reading selections, write their thoughts on the board, and then present their findings, standing in front of their comments. Applause and at least two student substantive comments/questions follow all presentations, individual and small group. Also, while students post weekly interpretive comments online, they explain their interpretations. Thus, students routinely talk, individually and in groups, applaud, present, and share.

Because the course begins with the Hebrew Bible, the articles that students first summarize in their individual presentations for the class include subject matter from the earliest-recorded stories and myths springing from the region and during the centuries that the Hebrew Bible developed: gods and goddesses of Canaan, the great mother archetype, Zoroastrianism in early Persia, Teubal (1984) on Sarah as a Chaldean priestess, Eisenberg (1998) on the mythic Mesopotamian ecology of Eden, and Kramer (1969) on Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythic sacred marriage rights. Biale (1997) highlights subversive women who fulfill divine objectives. Eisler (1988) connects symbols of matriarchal and patriarchal civilizations to imagery of the chalice and the blade to help recognize the diminution and demonization of women in patriarchal narratives; Egyptian and Greek mythologies narrate death and resurrection; Song of Songs has spiritual interpretations (King 2005); and Schroer and Staubli (2001) explain that the same word, literally, “breath,” as in “God breathed into his [Man's] nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 7:7), becomes “soul” as the Abrahamic traditions develop. Students recognize that the choice of a word, the emphasis of a story, and the selection of a thematic emphasis all represent polemic choices by scribes and redactors.

Another cluster of articles focuses on areas of the New Testament that provide a cultural studies approach to its themes. Ehrman (2014) eloquently addresses the historicity of Jesus and the cultural context that produced the early Christian movement and its later developments. Pagels (1996) explains the development of the idea of sin from the Hebrew Bible's “missing the mark” to the Christian understanding. For example, tracing philosophic and cultural influence, she reports how the snake, once representative of ancient wisdom and immortality, became the penultimate representation of sin as understood by Christian exegesis. Other topics include Ulanov (1993) on the female ancestors of Christ as depicted in both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of Mark, D. Boyarin (2013) on the Jewishness of Jesus, King (2003) on Origen's spiritualizing of the Song of Songs, Dunning (2021) on homosexuality in Paul's Letter to the Romans, Bauman-Martin (2009) on the annunciation of Mary as a rape scene, and the moralizing of parables.

The cluster of articles related to the Qur'an both connect the Qur'an with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible and New Testament with the Qur'an. While the Qur'an often references these two texts, the Qur'an takes elements of character, episodes, and ethics to guide believers into building righteous and stable communities. For example, Haleem (1999, pp. 123–137) sees references to Adam and Eve as a lesson of equity between the genders and the validation of earthly pleasures as divine gifts. Crone (2010) demonstrates how references to contemporaneous gods and goddesses help distinguish early Muslim communities from them. Paulus and Hasabelnaby (2021) introduce the qur'anic critical approach to slavery. Leaman (2004) highlights the value the Qur'an places on the natural world, beauty, and the peaceful everyday environment. Chaudhry (2013) confronts Sura 4:34 on wife beating, providing alternatives to understanding this complicated aya. Amin (2021) examines the nuanced portraits of women. Ali (2009) introduces complex issues of sexual ethics. I bring in contemporaneous Jewish and Christian writings about domestic violence, demonstrating the topic's contemporary currency. By using figural, thematic, and cultural strategies that connect all three Abrahamic works, students can recognize the multiplicity and diversity of that connectivity.

5 Conclusion

The democratization strategy helps students take ownership of their own learning experience. Comparatist literary figural, thematic, and cultural studies tools reaffirm the relevance of these texts. Because selected topics seem relevant, students make connections between the texts and their everyday lives. Rather than simplifying the general subject of these three Abrahamic works, these tools complicate these works. In feedback, students express a better acceptance of their own identities and spirituality as well as of religious diversity. A comparatist approach highlights the diversity of meaning-production; offers ways to avoid judgmental, exclusionary, and hierarchical thinking; and encourages critical engagement and openness to the cultural diversity that these texts represent and by extension to the world in which we live.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.