Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From "Lisbeth S. Fried" <lizfried AT umich.edu> =====
>Dear All,
>I appreciate all these suggestions.
>How do I go about examining all these books?

You take a year off of teaching and a library card, and spend all of your 
time 
comparing the most relevant and up-to-date resources. And when you're done, 
you compile an annotated bibliography for distribution to this list, so no 
one 
else has to go through all that work :-)

Seriously, I'm guessing you have something like a week to figure this out (if 
that), so if there's a standard that's been used in the class for a while, it 
might be a good idea to start with that. (Is there somewhere you can get hold 
of past syllabi? At the college where I used to teach, they kept copies in 
the 
library and in the academic office.) That saves you the embarrassment of 
choosing a new book that neither you nor the students find helpful. If you 
can 
get to a library and look at some of these candidates, you might be able to 
skim through them pretty quickly and get a sense of whether you could use 
them. You might also choose the newest, most hot-off-the-presses option. If 
it 
turns out not to be very good, you can always explain that they ought to know 
how it's not very good and why, especially because it's new, and maybe they 
can publish their reviews of the book.

Another issue you might consider is your strategy in using a textbook. I've 
had profs who relied so heavily on the textbook that you felt like you may as 
well just have read it yourself and skipped class. (Please don't do that.) 
Some choose a book that they basically agree with, essentially as a way to 
save their students from taking notes or free themselves up from spending 
much 
time on topics they don't want to cover. Some pick a book that they know 
they'll disagree with so they can spend all their time slamming it. 
Personally, I like to pick stuff that I know is going to challenge the 
students to think--something that has real value that they need to learn to 
glean, but that they're going to have to wrestle, sift, contemplate, and 
maybe 
sometimes reject outright. That's why I like the books that are basically 
collections of articles (or better yet--compiling my own collection for the 
students). What's that Eisenbrauns series called? It has books like "The 
Place 
is Too Small for Us" on the prophets, "The Flowering of OT Theology," etc. Or 
maybe have them read something like "In Search of 'Ancient Israel'" (P. 
Davies). It will probably bug the snot out of some of them, but if they don't 
like it, they can go do the work of figuring out what's wrong with his 
arguments. Of course, it helps that I taught in a pretty conservative school, 
so it didn't take much to shake them up :-)

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics