This summer, when you and your kids were sitting through The Secret Life of Pets or some other blockbuster, you were actually watching a pretty sophisticated cultural product. The reason it may not have seemed that way to you is because you grew up with most of the film’s “cultural memes” and processed them automatically. But a story that was written thousands of years ago? Not so much.
That’s the challenge Professor Andrew Teeter takes on with his work on the Hebrew Bible. Teeter teaches students to think in ways that differ, sometimes strongly, from their own native intuition, textual competencies, and training as twenty-first-century readers in order to understand one of the most critical texts of Western culture.
“The Hebrew Bible is a work of immense literary creativity and sophistication,” he says. “Understanding this literature and the thought underlying it requires learning to attend to a variety of sometimes surprising presuppositions, patterns, and communicative strategies. Overcoming this cultural gap poses a major challenge for us today—one that demands a substantial intellectual investment to overcome.”
Teeter has invested most of his own adult life in research and teaching designed to bridge this gap. As a scholar, he explores the poetics and formation of the Hebrew Bible and the diverse modes of literary production attending its early interpretation, all in relation to the development of Jewish thought, belief, and practice in the Second Temple period. Teeter wants to understand how these texts are designed to function as communication, the strategies of discourse and the modes of persuasion they employ, and what the texts expect of readers, the world they project, and the claims they make.
“My work is about understanding early Jewish encounter with scripture,” he says. “Why does the theological discourse of Second Temple Judaism take the forms of expression that it does? What do these forms of literary production mean, and what do they imply for the Jewish thought of the period? These are some of the questions that drive my work.”
“My research and teaching focus on understanding the poetics and formation of the Hebrew Bible and the diverse modes of literary production attending its early interpretation,” he says, “all in relation to the development of Jewish thought, belief, and practice in the Second Temple Period.”
In the classroom, Teeter employs an innovative approach that makes use of digital and other media to illuminate biblical stories written thousands of years ago. His use of everything from impromptu blackboard murals to mashups of pop songs has made him a favorite of students.
“I’m trying to foster an environment in which students can have a transformative intellectual encounter with the material,” Teeter said in the wake of being named HDS’s Outstanding Teacher in 2013. “That means doing anything I can, whether that’s Keynote presentations, bringing in media, film, YouTube clips, or chalkboard drawings. I try anything because each thing will connect with different students.”
While the history of the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible is important in its own right—whether you want to understand Judaism or Christianity—Teeter says that his work is about something more as well. Ultimately, he wants to help people learn to listen to the voices of the human past.
“This work is an encounter with the minds of persons who are in so many ways just like us, despite the vast chasm of time, language, and cultural distance,” he says. “It’s about appreciating the exquisite skill and artistry of this literature, whether or not it corresponds to our own artistic conventions or aesthetic preferences; it is about learning to recognize the profound depth of theological reflection on perennial human problems and how this reflection is brought to literary expression. These outcomes are not only priceless rewards in their own right, they also represent increasingly rare skills that are ever more urgent in today’s society.”
—by Paul Massari