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Hebrew Bible, Spanish, opening - folios VIIv/VIIIr (MET, 2018.59)

The study of the Hebrew Bible has a long and storied history at the University of Chicago. The University’s founding president, William Rainey Harper, was a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and an enthusiastic teacher of its text, ideas, and language, situated especially in relation to other ancient languages, cultures, and religions. When Harper came to Chicago, having been recruited by John D. Rockefeller to serve as the university’s first president,[1] he immediately invested heavily in the study of the ancient Near East. He recruited an eminent faculty, including his former student at Yale, the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, and his brother, the Assyriologist Robert Francis Harper. He actively solicited gifts to support ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies. Perhaps no gifts would be more influential than those of Caroline E. Haskell, who in 1894 donated $100,000 for the construction of the Haskell Oriental Museum, named in honor of her late husband, the businessman Frederick T. Haskell. Haskell Hall, as it is now known, was dedicated in 1896, already thirty years before the completion of Swift Hall, which was built directly north of Haskell between 1924 and 1926.

Those early days of the University were, no doubt, heady ones. At the dedication of the Haskell Oriental Museum, George S. Goodspeed, then Associate Professor of Ancient History and Comparative Religion, insisted upon a fundamental link between the study of ancient Near Eastern languages, religions, and material culture, the study of the Hebrew Bible, and the relevance of such comparison for contemporary society. He characterized these connections, moreover, as central interests of Mrs. Haskell and motivations for her gift:

In providing this building it is the thought of Mrs. Haskell that oriental studies, important as they are in themselves, should find their center and their greatest utility in their contributions to the better knowledge of the Divine Revelation contained in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. How well and wisely has she discerned the signs of the times! The Bible is a new book in light of our new studies in oriental life, oriental philology, oriental history, oriental archaeology, and oriental religion. And who can deny that what contributes to our better understanding of the Divine Truth of the Holy Scriptures contributes in the most immediate and practical way to the progress of the world?[2]

The priorities reflected in this statement—careful attention to historical, archaeological, philological, and comparative evidence; subordination of ancient Near Eastern subfields to biblical studies; and pursuit of religious ends—would play formative roles, both direct and inverse, in the development of biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Chicago over the next century. 

Least controversial was the first priority, historical evidence. Scholars in both Swift Hall and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute, which was successor to the Haskell Oriental Museum) have consistently pursued a rigorous, historically oriented investigation of the texts and material culture of the ancient Near Eastern world. Yet as the University’s scholars sought to shape the future of ancient Near Eastern studies, they also realized that historical inquiry required untethering fields like Egyptology and Assyriology from biblical studies. An approach that recognized the “conceptual autonomy” (Eigenbegrifflichkeit) of individual cultures in antiquity and that pursued them to their own ends, as famously advocated by the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger, became the dominant approach to the study of the ancient Near East at Chicago.[3] For much of the University’s history, this differentiation was expressed structurally: the study of the Hebrew Bible was located in the Divinity School, as part of the study of religion, while other ancient Near Eastern subfields were situated in their own department in the (now Arts and) Humanities Division. In recent years, with ancient Near Eastern studies firmly on its own footing, the Divinity School and the Arts and Humanities Division have both offered degree programs in the Hebrew Bible. The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures now also includes the Hebrew Bible among the specialties represented on its faculty.

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, and in line with interests that existed from the university’s earliest days, the Divinity School intentionally broadened the scope of its inquiry beyond Christianity. With respect to the Hebrew Bible, this expansion led to the faculty appointment of Jon D. Levenson, the first Jewish scholar to hold a professorship in the study of the Hebrew Bible in a major American Divinity School.[4] Since Levenson’s appointment in 1982, the Divinity School has continued to appoint Jewish scholars in this field, including Michael Fishbane, Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, and our present colleague, Simeon Chavel. Other American divinity schools, including Harvard Divinity School and Yale Divinity School, have now followed the University of Chicago’s lead and include Jewish scholars in Hebrew Bible positions. 

The Hebrew Bible remains a vibrant area of research and teaching in the Divinity School and the wider University. In many ways, its present shape closely resembles what it was at the university’s founding: comparative ancient Near Eastern studies continue to be a centerpiece of our approach. An additional program focus, spurred by contemporary faculty interests, is literary theorization of biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts, especially in tandem with historical critical approaches. 

In recent years, the University has become a recognized center for Pentateuchal studies, both in the United States and around the world. One product of this focus has been the Chicago-Yale Pentateuch Colloquium, an annual event that our Hebrew Bible faculty sponsor in cooperation with colleagues at Yale (extending the Chicago–Yale connection that Harper began). The Colloquium, which alternates between Chicago and New Haven and includes faculty and graduate student participants from around the world, is dedicated to research on the compositional history of the Pentateuch and especially new developments in the Documentary Hypothesis. 

In partnership with the University’s Forum for Digital Culture, we are also pursuing a major digital humanities project, the Chicago Digital Bible. The goal of this project is to produce an open-access digital critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, including manuscript images and transcriptions of all major witnesses, and to provide digital tools for building eclectic editions through an easy-to-use online interface. The first volume, on the Song of Songs, is scheduled for publication in the coming year through CORPUS, the University of Chicago’s new online publication venue.

Finally, the University’s influence in the field continues to grow through the work of our Hebrew Bible graduates. In the past decade, graduates of our doctoral programs have produced groundbreaking research on topics as varied as Judean ethnicity and diaspora, translation technique in the Septuagint, language contact among Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian, Pentateuchal Priestly law and narrative, biblical prophetic texts as literature, and Neo-Assyrian influence in ancient Judah. These scholars have also taken up faculty positions at leading universities around the world, including Princeton University, New York University, Brandeis University, Yale Divinity School, the University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Colorado–Boulder, Santa Clara University, Brigham Young University, Seoul Theological University, the University of St. Andrews, and the University of Chicago. 

Much has changed at the University of Chicago since its founding; much has also changed in Swift Hall. One way that the school’s founding vision—and Harper’s legacy—lives on is in our commitment to rigorous, critical study of the Hebrew Bible. May it be so for Swift’s next century as well.