Course Work

Students are required to take two years of coursework, with the expectation being that this will comprise a minimum of twelve courses spread over those two years. The only course that is specifically required, as is the case for all doctoral students in the department of Religious Studies, is RLST 510, Method and Theory, which is recommended to be taken in the first year of a student’s course work. There are, however, courses that all students are expected to take or have taken, including the two-semester History and Methods sequence, and the year of Advanced Biblical Hebrew. Given the distribution of the faculty, it is understood that many courses will be taken at the Divinity School. It is, however, the expectation that at least two non-language courses will be taken outside of those offered by the core Hebrew Bible faculty and outside of the Divinity School. These courses may be taken in any department or school, though we especially encourage students to take advantage of courses from other fields in Religious Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Classics, and Comparative Literature. The purpose of these non-Hebrew Bible courses is to give the student a broader intellectual framework, skills in comparative thinking, and exposure to other dimensions of critical scholarship, with the hopes that these will make the student an even better scholar of Hebrew Bible.