Students Respond to Inner-Biblical Connections
Two very different responses to the same class material this semester...
I have the privilege of teaching Old Testament 2 at both the seminary and college level this semester. It’s interesting how differently these two groups of students respond to what is often the same (or at least very similar) lecture.
I taught on Ezekiel recently and the topic of connections between biblical texts came up. Brief side note: These are called intertextual connections broadly, and when they are within the biblical text they are called inner-biblical connections. People usually talk about two subsets: Inner-Biblical Allusions and Inner-Biblical Exegesis. So within Ezekiel 36:26 and following, he talks about God giving the people a heart of flesh rather than a heart of stone. Jeremiah 31:31-34 speaks about a very similar subject. Also, Deuteronomy describes a time in the future (from the perspective of Deuteronomy) when God will circumcise the people’s hearts (Deut 30:6).
So I presented these texts, and a couple of different views about how and why these texts might be connected. It was the usual stuff, Inner-Biblical Allusion or Redactional layers, etc. But the response from the students to the concepts diverged greatly.
College Students
These students appeared to not be interested in the concepts or the implications. The average age in this group is around 20. They are relatively bright students, and interested in academics. Still, they struggled to see how the differing viewpoints on intertextual relationships was important for reading and understanding Ezekiel. The abstract ideas seemed to only register with a few of the students.
Seminary Students
The average age in this group is around 30. A couple of these students are what I would characterize as “bright” but not all of them. And yet, these students were very interested in understanding the differing viewpoints on intertextual connections. They sincerely wanted to know the arguments for differing viewpoints from their own. These students asked several probing questions about the intertextual connections, and suggested a few other connections as well. Most of them fully grasped the implications of viewing these textual similarities as inner-biblical allusion as opposed to the product of a “D” school or redactional layer. I actually had to bring the discussion to an end so we could move on and cover the rest of the day’s material.
Conclusion
Based on this one instance, I would say that grasping intertextual connections is probably something that can only be done with a fully developed pre-frontal cortex. I will still present ideas about intertextual connections to my college students, but I’ll likely abbreviate that part of my lecture outline for those students. Instead, I’ll leave extra time and space to discuss these things with seminary students.
In other news… Each month I try to write a post about teaching a specific topic in different audiences. Last month’s post was:
