Understand the world that made the Bible

If you have spent time with the Hebrew Bible — whether in a sanctuary, a seminary classroom, or simply on your own — you have probably had the experience of sensing that there is more beneath the surface than you know how to reach. The names, the places, the political conflicts, the strange religious practices: they gesture toward a world that is almost within grasp but keeps slipping away. That gap between the text and its world is exactly what this school is designed to close.

I have spent my academic life working at the intersection of ancient Near Eastern history, biblical archaeology, and the study of Israelite religion. What I have come to believe, deeply, is that the Hebrew Bible is a more interesting document when you understand the world that produced it — not less interesting, not more troubling, but genuinely richer. When you know what a royal inscription like the Mesha Stele is doing, and you read it alongside 2 Kings, something clicks into place. When you understand the archaeology of an Iron Age Israelite village — the four-room house, the grain storage pits, the household figurines — the social world behind Amos and Micah and Ruth suddenly has texture and weight. That is what I want to give you.

This school does not offer easy answers, because the field does not have them. The debates about Israelite origins, about the historicity of the united monarchy, about when and why monotheism emerged — these are live questions, argued at conferences and in journal pages, and I would rather walk you through the actual arguments than hand you a tidy summary that flattens the complexity. My commitment is to give you the tools to think historically: to read texts critically, to interpret material culture, to weigh competing theories against the evidence. These are skills, and like all skills, they become your own.

What I can promise is that nothing will be dumbed down, and nothing will be off-limits. Whether you are a lifelong churchgoer who has never encountered critical scholarship, a seminary student looking for deeper historical grounding, or a history enthusiast who has always been curious about the ancient Near East, you will be treated as an intelligent adult who is capable of handling real complexity. That is the only way I know how to teach.

I hope you will join me. The world of ancient Israel is one of the most fascinating civilizations the ancient Near East produced — and the evidence, when you learn to read it, is waiting to speak for itself.