Athens and Jerusalem Reconsidered: Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is one of the foundational texts of Jewish Civilization. It lays out the framework for Jewish practice through the Torah and the prophets and provides a record of Jewish history from Abraham to the return from Babylonian exile. Readers often overlook, however, the way that the Hebrew Bible takes up universal questions that are the heart of the human search for meaning and wisdom.  In approaching these foundational texts through a philosophical lens, we will discover some of the ways that the Bible speaks to the basic questions of human existence and contrast the answer found in the Bible with the answer provided by traditional Greek philosophy.

In this three-session sequence, we will begin by exploring the vision of human nature and politics implicit in the Ten Commandments.  We will then continue with an exploration of the Bible’s central figure, Moses, and the way his story echoes accounts given by political philosophers about the enduring truths of founding a nation. In our final session, timed to help us prepare for Purism, we will read an innovative take on Esther and her heroic – but also morally ambiguous – deeds.

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Dr. Ronna Burger

Ronna Burger is Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair in Philosophy and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Tulane University. She has been teaching there since 1980, after receiving her PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty. Her work has been supported by the Mellon, Humboldt, Earhart, and Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. Burger is the author of Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (2008), along with books on Plato’s Phaedo (1984, 1999) and Phaedrus (1980), and a monograph on the question of the holy in Plato’s Euthyphro (2015). Her published articles include “Maimonides on Knowledge of Good and Evil” and “Woman and Nature: the Female Drama of the Book of Genesis.” In recent years Burger has been teaching a series of courses on “Bible and Philosophy,” and has lectured at numerous college campuses on Adam and Eve, Rebekah, Joseph, Moses, and Esther.

Alan Rubenstein

Alan Rubenstein was educated in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and also at Georgetown University. He was a senior consultant for the President’s Council on Bioethics and currently serves as Hanson Scholar of Ethics at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. At Carleton, he teaches ethical thought through close reading of great literature of the West—in particular, Plato, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare. He is currently Director of University Programs for the Tikvah Fund. His published essays have focused on the philosopher Hans Jonas, the Hebrew Bible, and Judaism in middle America. He is married and a father of three children.

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