The course will analyze the close, perhaps inseparable, relationship between biblical ideas about God and ideas about the institutions of local and international government
(mainly in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament). A basic assumption is that the spheres of politics and theology were inextricably linked in ancient Israel, as they were in other cultures of the ancient Near East. The focus in the course will be on the biblical communities during the eras of the great empires of the first millennium B.C.E.: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece. We will ask, for example, what the relationship was between God and King, between rulers and subjects, between power and justice, and between imperialism and religion. In each case, answers or hypotheses will emerge from close reading of select biblical and non-biblical texts.
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